The Crisis of Infinity: Mathematics, Philosophy, and Nineteenth-Century Poetry

by

Rachel Elizabeth Feder

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature)

in The University of Michigan 2012

Doctoral Committee: Professor Marjorie Levinson, Chair Professor Adela N. Pinch Professor Yopie Prins Assistant Professor Gillian C. White

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Acknowledgements

This work is dedicated to Marjorie Levinson with infinite thanks. Ever since this project

began to take shape in Marjorie’s 2007 seminar on Romantic poetry and philosophy, she has

worked to bring out the best in both the scholar and the project. I am thankful to Marjorie

for her tireless mentorship, keen insight, honest critique, and endless encouragement. I am

lucky to have an advisor who is such a constant source of inspiration and support. Neither

this dissertation nor I would be the same without her.

Yopie Prins has shared her critical interventions and intellectual communities with me and

encouraged the development of my own, expanding my sense of what is possible. Time and

again, she has illuminated my scholarly endeavors, showing me how seemingly superfluous

points of interest and obsession were actually crucial to my argument. Yopie encouraged

experiments, organized ideas, and always saw the good. If my ideas have achieved elegance,

they have done so under her watch.

I am grateful to Adela Pinch for the constancy and clarity of her counsel. Adela provided an

encouraging word when needed and an honest word always. She fostered critical openness,

and her generous feedback and painstaking attention to detail fortified my writing process.

Adela was always available to discuss my work, and these conversations resulted in a cleared

head and an organized mind. I am grateful to her for helping me keep calm and carry on.

Many thanks to Gillian White for reminding me that I am still in many ways a student of

twentieth-century poetry, and for encouraging in me perspective and grace. Gillian helped

me nurture all the concerns intrinsic to my methodology, and reminded me to honor my

own intellectual history. Her insight and friendship go far beyond the scope of these pages.

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The Crisis of Infinity has benefitted from conversations with a number of scholars. Frances

Ferguson at ELH provided encouragement and useful feedback at a crucial moment. Anne-

Lise François, Alice Jenkins, Marilyn Gaull, John Whittier-Ferguson, Kerry Larson, Lucy

Hartley, Susan Levin, and David Mason have been generous with their time and advice. Jeff

Cowton and Rebecca Turner at the Wordsworth Trust have facilitated periods of productive

research. Molly Rothenberg provided a place for my work at Tulane, and Re Evitt and Jane

Hilberry did the same at Colorado College. This work bears the fingerprints of the School

of Criticism and Theory as well as the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Meredith McGill and William Galperin have placed a vote of confidence in future

incarnations of this project, and for this I am grateful.

Thanks to Rebecca Porte, Sarah Ehlers, and Nan Z. Da, my fellow travelers. Rebecca has

lived with me in my project for so long that I am sometimes surprised to meet her in the

margins. Sarah constantly reminds me to take my calamities in miniature. Nan remembers

when we had no audience but each other.

Thanks and love to Rob, Andrea, and Jed Feder, who are always behind me, and to Moshe

Kornfeld, who is always by my side.

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Table of Contents Acknowledgements...............................................................................................................................ii List of Figures.......................................................................................................................................vi Introduction...........................................................................................................................................1 PART ONE: THE AESTHETICS OF INFINITY Prelude: infinite immensity........................................................................................................................9 Chapter One: The Calculus & The Sublime I. Rates of Change.................................................................................................................20 II. Infinity Effects: Newton.................................................................................................25 III. The Analyst & The Artificial Infinite: Berkeley & Burke.........................................34 Chapter Two: Counting to Infinity & Discounting Infinity I. The Same Numerical Soul: Locke...................................................................................41 II. Nothing Less Than Infinity............................................................................................50 III. The Good Minute Goes................................................................................................52 IV. Anti-Infinity: Hume........................................................................................................56 PART TWO: THE POETICS OF INFINITY Interlude: kimonos, wrap-arounds and diatribes.....................................................................................65 Chapter Three: The Poetics of the Quotidian I. A Theory of the Particular................................................................................................69 II. Communal Genres...........................................................................................................82 III. The Grasmere Journals: A Counter-History..............................................................89 Chapter Four: Forms of Transcendence.........................................................................................95 I. Journeys, Mostly Inward: Byron & Wordsworth..........................................................96 II. A Note on Whitman......................................................................................................102 III. And All: William Carlos Williams..............................................................................106 IV. Sending the Line to Hell: Spicer.................................................................................111 V. Ghosts of Departed Quantities....................................................................................121 Conclusion: Forms of Inheritance I. Summation & Further Iterations...................................................................................123

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II. Coda: Neo-Romantic Infinity......................................................................................126 Notes...................................................................................................................................................137 Works Cited.......................................................................................................................................145

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List of Figures Fig. 1. Manuscript page containing Emily Brontë’s [I’m happiest when most away], printed with

permission of the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public

Library...................................................................................................................................................17

Fig. 2. Excerpt from Lorine Niedecker’s Next Year Or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous. Printed

in Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University

of California Press, 2002), 44............................................................................................................66

Fig. 3. Manuscript page from Dorothy Wordsworth’s commonplace book, printed with

permission of the Wordsworth Trust. DCMS 120.26..................................................................72

Fig. 4. Excerpt from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journals, printed with permission of

the Wordsworth Trust. DCMS 20...................................................................................................90

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INTRODUCTION

This is a dissertation written decades after the long 1980s; as such, it must deal with its own

romantic idealizations of that period in literary-critical history. Because the project’s guiding

obsession is with Romantic poetry and its afterlives, the argument’s center of gravity falls on

the Romantic sublime, an aesthetic category that is both intellectually evergreen and, as I will

show, always already dated. The project is therefore fueled, at least in part, by a desire to

reopen the classical Romanticist discourse on the sublime, or rather, by a curiosity about

what would happen were one to reopen that discourse.

The Romanticist discourse on the sublime was, in many ways, a debate about Romanticism,

and about the aesthetics of literary criticism itself in a period of methodological innovation

and theoretical inquiry. Thomas Weiskel diagrams the connections between Romantic

aesthetics and the modern obsession with mind1; Neil Hertz mobilizes the Romantic sublime

as the perfect metaphor for critical inquiry2; and, for all his poststructuralist twists and turns,

Steven Knapp points out the obvious—that the sublime was deconstruction before

deconstruction was deconstruction.3 Frances Ferguson’s stunning defense of Idealism is, in

the end, a critique of materialism—a materialism that, for Ferguson, sneaks into academic

argumentation.4

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Like many books about the Romantic sublime, this one makes a claim about Romanticism,

in this case, that understanding Romantic aesthetics and poetics means crossing the historical

borders that we use to delimit the Romantic period. Understood in this way, the Romantic

sublime represents the crux of a broader intellectual-historical phenomenon—a moment at

which Enlightenment debates about infinity are reimagined as aesthetic arguments.

Attending to this conceptual genealogy reveals another, that is, the processes by which

infinity and sublimity, twin Romantic aesthetic categories, permeate later modern poetic

practices. By situating Romantic aesthetics in a broader historical context, my project

engages in a false paradox insofar as it breaks down the critical barriers separating the

Romantic period from the Enlightenment, on the one hand, and Romantic from Victorian

poetry, on the other. The project does so in the service of understanding Romantic

aesthetics, long a high ideal of Romanticist studies, in the context of the history of ideas with

the goal of diversifying our understanding of the Romantic inheritance in later modern

poetry.

This last point—that we might complicate our understanding of the Romantic inheritance—

represents another starting point for the project. My interest in reopening the classical

Romanticist discourse on the sublime grew out of an initial set of questions about how

modern and contemporary poetry responds to mathematical methods and forms. Pursuing

these questions led me to view modern and contemporary poetic responses to math as

reiterations and responses, not to the science itself, but rather to prior poetic projects. I thus

became interested in the Romantic obsession with infinity, and with the Romantic sublime,

as a source of these literary traditions. In particular, a moment in Marjorie Levinson’s 2007

graduate seminar on Romantic poetry and philosophy illuminated Kant’s reliance on Locke’s

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understanding of infinity in his development of the mathematical sublime, and this signaled

to me that there might not have been an agreed upon or stable definition of infinity in the

period or periods in question. Research into mathematical history confirmed my suspicion

that Enlightenment formulations of infinity and Romantic responses to these formulations

were part of an expansive intellectual-historical phenomenon that I call the crisis of infinity.

This dissertation employs varied methodologies to explore the history, cultural inscription,

literary influence, and artistic legacy of this crisis. To this end, the first half of the

dissertation makes an influence argument in the context of intellectual history, namely, that

Romantic aesthetic theories, and in particular formulations of the Romantic sublime, come

out of a prior discourse about the nature and reality of infinity. Expanding this method for

the purposes of historically-informed exegesis, I argue that understanding the connections

between infinity, sublimity, and poetry is crucial to producing new and compelling readings

of nineteenth-century poems.

The crisis of infinity provides an important context for literary criticism in a number of ways.

The first and most tangible is that it provides a productive framework for rereading

canonical texts in intellectual-historical context and for reading less- or non-canonical texts

in relation to more canonical texts, not via acts of critical recuperation, but rather by

rethinking conceptual genealogies. An example of the former mode of reading is my

interpretation, at the end of chapter two, of Wordsworth’s The Tables Turned, in which I

invert the widely accepted reading of that poem’s infamously anti-intellectual statement—

that we murder to dissect—in order to show that it can in fact be read as an intellectual

intervention defending Hume’s rejection of infinite divisibility. An example of the latter

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mode of reading occurs at the beginning of chapter three, where I read two poems by

Dorothy Wordsworth—one of her most famous poems, Floating Island, which has been

taken up in ecocritical and other contexts, and a poem of hers that is virtually unknown

insofar as I found it in the back of a notebook—and demonstrate how these two poems,

when read in their various material-historical contexts, can be shown to make an intellectual-

historical intervention insofar as they pick up on William Wordsworth’s response to Locke’s

formulation of infinity but also alter this formulation in meaningful ways.

Beyond facilitating new readings, understanding the link between poetry and infinity

contributes to the discipline in two major ways. The first is by highlighting a moment at

which literary discourse participates in mathematical debates. This is a moment of crisis in

another sense of the term—that of discursive crossing over—that I argue must be taken into

account by scholars seeking to develop a field of literary-critical inquiry focused on the

intersections between mathematical and literary history.

There exists in nineteenth-century literary studies a trend towards interdisciplinary

approaches to literature and science, and an emerging sub-field focused on literature and

mathematics. Scholars working in or in relation to this field include Alice Jenkins, Andrea

Henderson, Maureen McLane, Marilyn Gaull, Daniel Brown, and Jason Hall, and a year ago

the first conference devoted to nineteenth-century literature and mathematics was held at the

University of Glasgow. The sub-field is becoming increasingly established, and, if you’ll

forgive the witticism, is about as trendy as anything involving both poetry and mathematics

could ever hope to be.

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Studies of nineteenth-century literature and mathematics have involved a variety of

interdisciplinary methodologies, ranging from detailed historical interventions (such as Alice

Jenkins’ current work on the print circulation of mathematical riddles alongside literary texts

in English periodicals) to broader cultural claims (such as Andrea Henderson’s work on

artistic responses to post-Euclidian geometry).5 This varied and fascinating field of inquiry is

lent some historical weight, and might even be to some extent changed, when we recognize

that early nineteenth-century literature actively participates in mathematical discourse.

Romantic aesthetic and poetic responses to and refractions of Enlightenment debates about

infinity represent a signal example of what I might call genuine or historical

interdisciplinarity—of literature and mathematics in conversation even before any external

methodological or conceptual understanding of interdisciplinarity is applied. The exact

nature of this contribution to the subfield remains an open question.

In sum, the first half of the dissertation argues that the crisis of infinity represents a broad—

and broadly neglected—intellectual-historical phenomenon the understanding of which

facilitates clarifications and complications of nineteenth-century verbal art. Within the

context of Romantic literature, such an investigation contextualizes the Romantic obsession

with infinity, an obsession readily apparent in some of the most famous and most enigmatic

passages from the Romantic canon. Wordsworth concludes The Prelude’s vision atop Mount

Snowdon with a “meditation” in which “appear[s] […] The perfect image of a mighty

mind,/Of one that feeds upon infinity”6; Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell claims that

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite”7;

Byron, in Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage, describes a divine experience of nature as stirring “the

feeling infinite, so felt/In solitude, when we are least alone”8; and Shelley’s Mont Blanc

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describes how “Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,/Mont Blanc appears,—still, snowy,

and serene” and then addresses Mont Blanc with the assertion, “The secret strength of

things/Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome/of heaven is as a law, inhabits

thee!”9 Each mention of Romantic infinity adds another turn of the screw, so that the term,

“infinity,” becomes the literary-historical analogue of a sestina end-word, a term that does

and does not hold together its divergent contexts and appropriations, to aesthetic effect.

Yet a dissertation motivated solely by an interest in the Romantic obsession with infinity

might look quite different from the dissertation at hand. Such an investigation of the crisis

of infinity might investigate, for example, the landscape as value system in the early gothic

novel, the invention of perspective in the visual arts, and so forth. I have focused instead on

the issue of poetics—on reading canonical and non-canonical poems in intellectual-historical

context. There are two questions of methodology that remain to be answered, namely: Why

poetry? Why infinity? Of all the mathematical, scientific, and philosophical debates of the

Enlightenment period, why does the topic, problem, or practice (so to speak) of infinity

show up so regularly and persistently throughout nineteenth-century poetry and poetics?

Might the link between poetry and infinity tells us anything about poetry? Might we think

about the poem as an enumerative object of verbal art, its lines counting towards something

that cannot be contained?

Building on the influence argument (i.e. mathematical history influenced aesthetic

philosophy, which in turn influenced poetic production/e.g. Berkeley read Newton, and

Locke read Berkeley, and Wordsworth read Locke, therefore Wordsworth is influenced by

Newton’s understanding of infinity) as well as the intellectual-historical argument (i.e. that

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Romantic aesthetics, and in particular theories of the sublime, come out of a prior discourse

about infinity) presented in the first half of the dissertation, the second half of the project

asks what the connection between infinity and poetry means, and poses some answers.

To this end, chapter three represents a moment of methodological transition. On the one

hand, the chapter argues that understanding the crisis of infinity can provide one framework

for pulling more- and less-canonical Romantic texts into conversation with one another;

because some of the less-canonical texts I consider are archival texts, this process involves

rethinking the Romantic archive as an intellectual-historical nexus. On the other hand, this

chapter considers the daily and enumerative forms of Dorothy Wordsworth’s writings in

relation to poetic forms, and thus raises some issues about how and whether debates about

infinity can function as literary theories.

In response to this challenge, chapter four brings both eighteenth- and early nineteenth-

century infinity discourse to bear on a range of poems from the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries and from Britain and the United States. The point of this excursus is to show that

the crisis of infinity represents not only an historical origin but also a set of theories—

indeed, a system of poetics—with enduring influence. Casting the relationship between

enumeration and infinity as a question of form, I thus conclude with an inquiry at once more

concrete and more theoretical, namely, the role of the line—the poetic line—in a range of

nineteenth- and twentieth-century long poems. It is, I believe, the historically specific

understanding of the relationship between enumeration and infinity that gives us a new

purchase on the line and its centrality to modernist poetics, while at the same time bringing

out the extent to which many nineteenth-century poems may be said to anticipate that

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device. This final chapter departs from a strictly historicist method in order to ask whether

Enlightenment formulations of infinity and Romantic responses to these formulations may

be applied as literary theories, and to venture some answers, all of them in some fashion

rooted in my explication of infinity as a matrix for coordinating enumeration with affect, or

practices of counting with the notion of experiencing something that seems to transcend the

sum of its parts.

Following this theoretical experiment, I offer a coda that begins to think through the

modernist afterlives of Romantic infinity, that is, I return to some of the modern and

contemporary poetic treatments of mathematics that first caused me to travel back in time,

this time with some sense of their history.

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PART ONE: THE AESTHETICS OF INFINITY

Prelude:

in f ini te immensi ty The Crisis of Infinity: Mathematics, Philosophy, and Nineteenth-Century Poetry offers two

interlocking arguments, one literary-historical and one meta-critical. The dissertation’s

historical argument claims that Romantic aesthetic theories and early nineteenth-century

poetic practices participate in Enlightenment debates about infinity, and that these debates

are therefore of consequence to our understanding of nineteenth-century literature. The

dissertation justifies an historically-grounded method for reading Romantic aesthetics in

mathematical terms, and argues that the application of this method: 1) helps us to re-read

Romantic texts that both do and do not address infinity explicitly, beginning with theories

of the sublime; 2) helps to clarify certain aspects of the Romantic inheritance in later

modern poetry; and 3) allows us to ground critical treatments of poetry and mathematics in

an early nineteenth-century moment at which aesthetics and poetics participate in

mathematical debates. The meta-critical argument that accompanies this historical

intervention posits the turn of the nineteenth century as a moment at which literary history

and mathematical history intersect, and thus as a moment for which we must account as we

develop a literary-critical field focused on literature and mathematics.

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The first part of this dissertation, “The Aesthetics of Infinity,” asks how an understanding of

the early nineteenth-century links between mathematics, aesthetics, and poetics can help us

to reconsider the nineteenth-century poetic canon. To this end, the first two chapters of the

dissertation take formulations of the Romantic sublime as a case study, the analysis of which

yields a deeper understanding of the intersections among mathematical and literary

discourses; the terms and formulations of these discourses clarify and complicate certain

nineteenth-century poems. The second part of the dissertation, “The Poetics of Infinity,”

expands the scope of this critical investigation in the following ways. Chapter Three asks

how the intellectual-historical connections established in the first half of the project can help

us to rethink the Romantic archive as an intellectual-historical nexus, taking the poetic/daily

writings of Dorothy Wordsworth as its point of focus. Chapter Four asks how

Enlightenment and Romantic formulations of infinity might be considered and applied as

theories of poetic form, and a concluding coda considers how the Romantic poetics of

infinity persists into the twentieth century.

Along with the historical argument I have sketched, The Crisis of Infinity has a meta-critical

dimension, namely, the suggestion that the current interest in mathematics and literature

among scholars of Victorian literature would do well to look back to the early nineteenth

century, and to that era’s still active engagement with key philosophical texts from the

Enlightenment. Our critical readings of later modern poetry in relation to mathematical

history are not only enhanced but to some degree changed when we extend that history back

through the late eighteenth century.

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One example of a later nineteenth-century poem that can be productively reread in terms of

the connections between Enlightenment debates about infinity and Romantic aesthetics and

poetics is Emily Brontë’s brief, untitled poem that begins “I’m happiest when most away.”

When the poem’s conclusion in praise of “infinite immensity” is understood in the context

of debates about infinity, the poem becomes a much less stable text than it may first appear.

Specifically, the negotiation of selfhood with which Emily Brontë concludes [I’m happiest when

most away] takes on new meaning when read in terms of Locke’s understanding of counting

as that process the apparent endlessness of which allows us to believe in infinity, and in

terms of Locke’s abstraction of this model to suggest that counting also leads us to believe in

our identity and in the infinity of God. Invoking one voice from Enlightenment debates

about infinity thus provides us with a framework for understanding Brontë’s portrayal of the

paradox of self-escape as the proposal of a new definition of selfhood.

Chapter Two will explore in greater detail the ways in which John Locke’s touchstone

formulation of infinity is inextricably linked to issues of self-identification, self-recognition,

and faith in oneself and in the divine. For the purposes of this reading, let me just very

briefly present Locke’s argument. In his 1689 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,

Locke argues that the “endless addition […] of numbers […] is that which gives us the

clearest and most distinct idea of infinity”10; furthermore “the identity of the same man

consists […] in nothing but a participation of the same continued life, by constantly fleeting

particles of matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized body.”11 Locke posits

infinity and identity as twin abstractions understood via counting—by counting anything, in

the former case, and moments that one is oneself, in the latter. While we will return to the

contexts and nuances of Locke’s argument later, for now we will consider how Brontë’s

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figuration of the disembodied soul dwelling in infinite immensity applies Locke’s

triangulation of infinity, selfhood and belief to activate a process of simultaneous self-

assertion and self-dissolution.

Brontë’s poem expresses a desire to liberate, or a remembered joy associated with liberating

the soul from its worldly ties, enabling its spiritual and visionary movement, and defining it

as part of the infinite. Brontë describes the infinite as the soul’s ultimate home, better than a

home of clay. Puns and syntactic turns confound what is and what is not, what self and

what other, what seen and what embodied:

I’m happiest when most away I can bear my soul from its home of clay On a windy night when the moon is bright And my eye can wander through worlds of light When I am not and none beside Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky But only spirit wandering wide Through infinite immensity12

The phrase “only spirit” in the penultimate line invokes diverse possibilities for meaning. Is

the I only spirit? Is there nothing but spirit? Is the spirit singular, only, or alone? If we take

these three possible meanings together, then the poem ends with the self reduced to spirit,

the world reduced to spirit, and the singularity of spirit. In other words, the poem ends with

the dissolution of everything into spirit “wandering wide/through infinite immensity.”

Everything dissolves into the infinite.

And yet, in the poem’s closing line, the spirit wanders “through” the infinite. Such syntax

might indicate that the spirit, or the I composed of spirit, is distinct from the infinite, or is

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somehow behind or obfuscated by it. Just as the two words “infinite immensity” contain

remixes of one another’s phonemes, just as they combine to create an absolute that is in its

own right self-modifying and self-definitional, so too is the I or the spirit somehow both an

integral part of and distinguished from the substance through which it moves. To “wander

wide,” after all, denotes one’s finitude—expansion indicates that something is not already

wholly expansive. Thus, even when dissolving into infinity, the soul remains finite. Whether

the self is obfuscated or liberated, the poem cannot imagine a self that is not self-determined.

Taking the word “spirit” as a verb furthers this interpretation, as the I may be animating,

creating, and/or inspiring its own spirit. In this sense, the spirit is action rather than axiom,

just as “away” is also “a way,” an escapist methodology.

Applying a Lockean model of infinity to the poem’s presentation of the paradox of self-

escape shows us that the poem’s escapist fantasy involves a redefinition of selfhood. If

counting towards infinity is a process constitutive of self-recognition, then what version of

selfhood comes into play when a poem subtracts towards infinity? [I’m happiest when most

away] answers this question by activating a poetics of negation: the I is most happy when

most away; the punning “bear” occurs not to but from; the punning “eye” wanders through

worlds made up of no more than the light that would reveal them; “I am not and none

beside/Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky” [emphasis mine]. The poem erases its elements

almost as soon as it presents them, so that the poem progresses via a process, not of

addition, but of subtraction. The infinity realized by this process is “infinite immensity,” and

the selfhood activated is “spirit wandering wide,” a selfhood accumulated and dissolved

through mass inclusion, a selfhood at once indistinct and substantial.

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One way to illustrate the affective dynamics of the poem’s process of negation and

accumulation is to read the poem bottom to top. Read in vertical reverse, the poem portrays

a self, located and delineated, glorifying in its dreamy forays into personal and spiritual

excess. The modest and beautiful result of such an inversion sounds like something by

Emily Dickinson:

Through infinite immensity But only spirit wandering wide Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky When I am not and none beside And my eye can wander through worlds of light On a windy night when the moon is bright I can bear my soul from its home of clay I’m happiest when most away

That the inversion of Brontë’s poem presents a bounded self presided over by a

transcendent boundlessness further demonstrates the extent to which the original poem

presents a transcendent boundlessness infused with the self. Beyond the paradox of self-

escape, Brontë’s poem argues for the possibility of a new definition of the unlimited self.

This is a self that exists insofar as it lacks a separate identity. Rather than a point of

concentration at which the forces of the universe gather, the “I” in Brontë’s poem is almost

godlike—we might picture a sieve through which the elements that once made up the

individual fan out to take the form of “spirit.”

This new self, achieved by negative or negating expansion, provides a compelling

counterpoint to the mythology of a continuous, elusive authorial self often received

alongside Emily Brontë’s work as a matter of cultural inheritance. While [I’m happiest when

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most away] was left unedited by Charlotte Brontë after Emily’s death, Charlotte’s editing of a

volume of Emily’s poetry for posthumous publication, her exaggerated and expurgating

portrayal of her sister in the introductory matter to that volume, and her erasure of the

extended Gondal myth that transfixed many of Emily’s poems in a narrative web put into

motion the mythology of a Sapphic figure of authorial continuity. Lucasta Miller provides

an extensive interpretation of Charlotte Brontë’s remaking of her sister in the anti-biography

The Brontë Myth, in which she examines, for example, how Charlotte turned Emily’s [No

coward soul is mine] into the impassioned swan song of “a stoic whose ‘spirit was inexorable to

the flesh’ and who faced her end with superhuman strength.”13 While the evidence at hand

will not suffice to counter the artifice surrounding the reception of Emily Brontë as a

Victorian heroine, it is interesting to take as counterpoint the opposing and to some extent

neo-Romantic vision of expansive and infinite selfhood set forth by Emily Brontë in [I’m

happiest when most away]. Perhaps the diffuse selfhood portrayed in this poem provides us

with one way of understanding the authorial model that has been erased by the textual and

editorial legacy at work in the production of Emily Brontë as a cultural icon.

In fact, when this poem first circulated it included early twentieth-century traces of the sorts

of revisionary practices exercised by Charlotte Brontë in constructing her sister’s legacy. In

his 1910 edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë, the first such attempt, Clement Shorter

presents a version of [I’m happiest when most away] with a very different sense of temporality

and struggle for transcendence:

I’m happiest now when most away I can tear my soul from its mould of clay,14

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The meter-regularizing “now” in the poem’s opening line defines the occasion of the poem

itself as a moment of escape; in so doing, the edit follows Charlotte Brontë’s portrayal of

Emily as a perfect, womanly creature passively transcribing brilliant if improper inspiration.15

This insertion also follows Charlotte’s emphasis on the swan song, as the “now” of

readership occurs in 1910, when the poet is long deceased. Similarly, to “tear” the soul from

its “mould,” as opposed to “bearing” the soul from its “home,” shifts an image of revelation,

transport, and agency to a register of painful struggle, if not death. The “mould of clay”

explicitly connotes the mortal body, while “tearing” the soul away denotes permanent if not

violent separation. To some extent, then, Shorter in his edit overwrites Emily Brontë’s

presentation of a new understanding of selfhood with an early twentieth-century editor’s

figuration of the ways in which the dead author—“When I am not, and none beside[…]but

only spirit” here takes on a clear and distinct meaning—is somehow happier, or at least freer,

than she was in life. Reading, editing, and publishing her work, then, becomes a kind of

celebration or rescue within the discursive space of the edited poem itself. The poet

remembered posthumously in the first edition of her edited work is “happiest now,” and it is

not only the meter that is corrected. In some sense, then, if we care to wax psychoanalytical,

perhaps we could say that Shorter’s edit expresses a sort of wish for his edited volume.

Transfiguring the notion of selfhood presented by [I’m happiest when most away] becomes, in

this case, an act of both honoring and ventriloquising the dead.

A glance at the original manuscript page helps us to refine our claims regarding the extent to

which Shorter engages in a tradition of remaking-by-transcribing Emily Brontë. To see

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what Shorter saw proves that “now” and “mould” represent editorial choices. However, to

be fair, “bear” looks a lot like “tear”:

Fig. 1. Manuscript page containing Emily Brontë’s [I’m happiest when most away], printed with permission of the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

Comparing, for example, the “t” at the end of “happiest” with the “b” in “bear”

demonstrates how easily one could misread the word. Closer inspection, however, reveals

that the lowercase “t” consistently has a trunk, while the lowercase “b” branches off at the

base of the letter. Thus, at least one part of Shorter’s inaccurate transcription of the poem,

for all its symbolic resonance, could just as easily be the product of smudged glasses or a

failure to triple-check the details. Overall, however, we must view Shorter’s transcription as

an act of editing, not only the poem, but also Emily Brontë.

One interpretation of [I’m happiest when most away] is, of course, no match for a tradition of

reading Emily Brontë into and out of liberal remakings of her poems. Our purpose here is

not to reshape, re-craft, or replace the version of authorial selfhood we associate with Emily

Brontë’s poetry, nor is it to remake Emily Brontë or add up the accidents and impulses that

have colored her canonization. What I mean to suggest is that the intellectual- and literary-

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historical framework of Locke’s infinity allows us to recognize a potentially surprising

formulation of selfhood in one of Brontë’s poems; this historical framework also allow us to

rethink and approach Brontë’s archive. Situating [I’m happiest when most away] within this

frame also exposes its negotiation of one particular inheritance of Romanticism. These three

objects of inquiry—how we might reread poems in the context of the crisis of infinity, how

this might allow us to think about the nineteenth-century archive, and what all of this means

for our understanding of the Romantic inheritance in later modern poetry—form a guiding

constellation for the project at hand.

I open with this set of observations in order to suggest that the early nineteenth-century

links between poetry and infinity can help us to read a broad range of poems. Additionally,

as I will show, working within such a framework helps to generate and structure critical

innovations stressing the connections among literature, philosophy, and mathematics, on the

one hand, and between material and intellectual histories, on the other. In the chapters to

follow, my pursuit of these goals will take as axiomatic the premise that effective

interdisciplinarity requires a willingness to cross scholarly boundaries delimiting not only

discipline but also historical period. Insofar as the work at hand illuminates both the extent

to which nineteenth-century poetry participates in the continuation of Enlightenment

debates about infinity and the extent to which these contributions form part of the Romantic

inheritance in later poetry, this project highlights ongoing discussions of infinity as a point of

continuity between the Enlightenment and Romantic periods and between Romantic and

later poetry.

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Recuperating the intellectual-historical trajectory within which nineteenth-century poets

remake and enter into Enlightenment discussions about the nature and reality of infinity

disrupts the common understanding of the Romantic sublime as an impassioned and

individualistic break from Enlightenment rationality. Similarly, establishing the Romantic

emphasis on the infinite as an important component of the Romantic inheritance disrupts

our assumptions about how Victorian and modern poems accept, reform, and reject this

inheritance. Towards these goals and per Brontë’s poem, the dissertation accumulates via

acts of erasure—of historical boundaries, dominant readings, and assumptions about

historical and disciplinary divisions. Through these acts of erasure, the dissertation traces a

crisis from its moment of rupture and expansion to its afterlife as rhetorical form, literary

trope, and un-romanticized touchstone of the Romantic inheritance.

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Chapter One

The Calculus & The Subl ime

I. Rates o f Change

William Wordsworth’s lyrical ballad The Last of the Flock recounts a tragedy in mathematical

terms.16 In the poem, “[a] healthy man, a man full grown” tells of the tragic relationship

between two rates of change (l. 3). He explains how he has come to hold a single lamb, the

last of his flock. At the beginning of the tale, the man’s flock grows: as “such a one,” “a

single man,” he buys “a ewe” (l. 5, ll. 21-4). The stanza goes on to report that “then I

married” (l. 27), as if to imply a single rubric for both events, something like an existential

emergence from singularity into sociality via the figuring of a “you”/“ewe.” From the wife

come “[t]en children,” from “this single ewe” come “[f]ull fifty comely sheep” (l. 41, ll. 32-3).

Yet the parallel rates of change by which “[t]hey throve, and we at home did thrive” do not

last (l. 36). Denied relief from the parish in a time of need, the man must sell his sheep to

buy his “little children bread” (l. 52). As the flock dwindles “one by one” (l. 66), the rates of

change in the flock of children and the herd of sheep are pulled into an inverse relationship.

The more mouths the man has to feed, the more sheep he must sell, and:

They dwindled, dwindled, one by one, And I may say that many a time I wished they all were gone: They dwindled one by one away;

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For me it was a woeful day. (ll. 66-70)

The deep tragedy of the poem, however, lies not in the depletion of the man’s flock or in the

family’s poverty, but rather in the fact that economic rates of change—selling sheep to feed

children—usurp upon those rates of change that govern the man’s emotional life. The

relationships that govern the economic realm1 come to govern the world of feeling:

Sir! ‘twas a precious flock to me, As dear as my own children be; For daily with my growing store I loved my children more and more. Alas! it was an evil time; God cursed me in my sore distress, I prayed, yet every day I thought I loved my children less; And every week, and every day, My flock, it seemed to melt away. (ll. 81-90)

The ambiguous mention of “my flock” in the last line of this stanza mirrors the man’s

“wish” that “they all were gone,” a wish followed by a mysterious passage about the man’s

“wicked deeds” and “wicked fancies,” and the “ill” known of him by other men (ll. 71-4).

Leaving the reader to imagine the substance of these facts and fantasies, the man complains:

“And crazily, and wearily,/I went my work about./Oft-times I thought to run away;/For me

it was a woeful day” (ll. 77-80).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!We note that the laws governing the economic situation in this case contradict the law of supply and demand—here, more is more. Furthermore, I should note that my argument concerns itself not with economics but with mathematics. In terms of The Last of the Flock, this means that I am concerned with rates of change and the approach of limits, though I acknowledge that such concerns come up against Marxian analyses of Capitalism in which the commodity form and the laws of the marketplace come to determine all social relations.!

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The grisly inference, i.e. that the man murders his children, is supported by mathematical

law. While the flock increases, the man’s family grows. Now that the flock dwindles, it is

both logical and mathematically probable that the flock of children will decrease as well. In a

crazed logic, then, the fortune of the man is both made and unmade by forces outside of his

control. Rates of change that once paralleled one another, and that indeed seemed causally

linked, cannot suddenly fall into an inverse relationship. By this token, the logic of the

parish—that the man should reduce his flock in order to build up his family—represents a

false logic, a logic imposed by a governing body on a rural man who must obey the laws of

nature, which in this case dictate twin prosperities or total demise.2

However darkly or sympathetically we choose to read the image of the man holding the lamb

at the poem’s close—a lamb that, through the course of the poem, undergoes a

transformation from alive (“—This lusty lamb of all my store/Is all that is alive” (ll. 37-8)) to

dead (“And here it lies upon my arm,/Alas! and I have none” (ll.97-8))—we must reckon

with the logic implied by this image. Whether we judge the man at his tale’s end to have ten

children at home or none, we recognize that the poetic approach towards this end has been

enumerative. The elements of the poem are repeatedly numbered: e.g. “such a one” (ll. 5);

“He makes my tears to [“two”] flow./To-day[…]” (ll. 18-19); “Another still! and still

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!2 In the 1993 article “Double Economics: Ambivalence in Wordsworth’s Pastoral,” Mark Jones cites the dominant reading of this poem as follows, that “[t]he shepherd interprets his own situation as showing that the ability to love depends on material well-being.” Jones argues that the poem’s subject’s “claim that his flock was ‘[a]s dear’ to him ‘as [his] own children’ is belied by his actions; if the claim were true, he could not have sacrificed the flock to feed his children. That he has reflects his ability even in hardship to distinguish and choose in socially acceptable ways between material and spiritual values.” Thus, Jones states that “[t]he poem argues that love really can survive property” and reads the suggestion of murdered children as “an appropriately crisscrossed exclamation, a single figure that at once expresses his anguish at the killing of his flock, displaces his guilt (the killing is self-sacrifice), and obliquely equates the killing with the murder of his own children.” Here, I focus not on the poem’s psychodrama but on those dark possibilities opened up by the poem’s suggestion of its adherence to mathematical law. [Mark Jones, "Double Economics: Ambivalence in Wordsworth's Pastoral," PMLA 108, no. 5 (Oct., 1993): 1105-6.]

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another/A little lamb, and then its mother!/It was a vein that never stopp’d,/Like blood-

drops from my heart they dropp’d./Til thirty were not left alive/They dwindled, dwindled,

one by one” (ll. 61-66). Whatever the logic that governs the descent to zero and the

approach of ruin, these abstractions occur in enumerative increments predictably

approaching their dire limits. Luck is in flux, but that does not make it random.

I offer these observations by way of introducing a set of claims about the naturalization of

mathematical concepts in Romantic poetry. In this case, Newton’s fluxion theory—a set of

expectations about infinity that could be used to predict rates of change, limits and

disappearances—plays out over the course of the lyrical ballad with physical and emotional

consequences. Identifying the links between Newton’s fluxion theory and early nineteenth-

century literature will provide a fruitful starting point for thinking through the ways in which

Romantic aesthetics participates in mathematical debates. Located in the middle of a

century-long period over the course of which there was no stable definition of infinity in

either the mathematical or the philosophical realm, the early nineteenth century represents a

moment at which discussions of infinity, already couched in the idioms of mathematics,

philosophy, and religion, gave rise to innovations in aesthetic philosophy and verbal art.

The Romantic sublime serves as the crux and emblem of this crossing over. As an aesthetic

category with multiple versions and guises, the sublime borrows, builds on, and remakes

Enlightenment formulations of infinity in terms of number, selfhood, divinity, and sensory

experience. Thus, reading the sublime in particular, and Romantic period aesthetics in

general, in terms of prior mathematical debates means reading these aesthetic theories on

their own terms. In so doing, I aim to recover a conceptual genealogy that has been effaced

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by disciplinary divisions separating Enlightenment from Romantic thought and mathematical

from literary inquiry.

Introducing the ubiquitous cultural influence of Euclid in the Victorian period, Alice Jenkins

writes that little attention has been paid to the workings of mathematics in Victorian culture

and that this “problematic absence […] has resulted in a tendency to overemphasize the

cultural impact of some scientific disciplines, and hence in a skewing of our understanding of

the readership for and reception of scientific knowledge.”17 In the four years since Jenkins

sounded this call to arms encouraging interdisciplinary studies of nineteenth-century

literature and mathematics, the practice of identifying resonances and commonalities among

literary and mathematical histories has come into vogue, and has facilitated productive

readings of a number of nineteenth-century texts. Using Enlightenment debates about

infinity to situate early nineteenth-century aesthetics and its poetic applications, however,

does more than to illuminate common ways of thinking or chains of cultural influence.

Rather, such a critical practice highlights an historical moment at which responses to a

touchstone mathematical problem were reimagined as theorizations of a foundational literary

category. On this count, Romantic aesthetics marks a signal point of focus if we are to

develop a critical approach centered on the intersections between mathematics and literature.

In so doing, we ensure that interdisciplinary approaches to later modern poetry take into

account this aspect of the Romantic inheritance.

While early nineteenth-century philosophers and authors formulate questions of infinity in

aesthetic and literary terms, we should note that these were in many cases already questions

of effect, that is, of infinity’s role in the workings of mind and mathematics alike. Alongside

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Berkeley’s religious examination of whether it might be possible to say anything about

infinity, we find in eighteenth-century thought, for example, Locke’s proof regarding why we

might come to feel that infinity exists and Hume’s exploration of how infinity belies the

information inherent in sensory experience. We will begin, however, with the case of

Newton’s fluxion theory, a system of mathematical half-truths that predicts and describes

the effects (and, as I will argue, affects) of infinity as it works in the calculus. Our

examination of Newton’s fluxion theory will allow us to enter into a broader discussion of

the aftermaths of an uncertain infinity.

II. Inf ini ty Effec ts : Newton

In current usage, the word “infinity”—boundless, limitless, as large as possible—may evoke

mystery, but is not in itself an enigmatic term. The word’s relatively stable denotation

coincides with a stable mathematical definition of the concept, with debates about infinity

more or less closed since the end of the nineteenth century. Cantor articulated his bedrock

definition of infinity in 1874. In so doing, he built on the findings of classical analysis, the

development of which flourished between the 1810s and the 1850s and focused on making

calculus sound and developing related theories. Thus, the period of mathematical history

that led to Cantor’s definition of infinity involved the piecemeal construction of an infinity

enmeshed in notions about limits, recursion, continuity, and series—a veritable poetics of

ideas.18

Cantor’s groundbreaking proof of infinity in its original (1874) and subsequent forms not

only answered but also to some extent mirrored prior debates. This is because, while Cantor

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was able to offer a stable mathematical proof of infinity, this proof involved showing that

infinity was not a monolithic concept, i.e. that there were different versions of infinity.

Cantor developed his proof of infinity based on set theory and the concept of cardinality

(how many elements are in a set). Mathematical historian Hans Niels Jahnke explains that

“Cantor was the first to use the concept of pairwise correspondence to distinguish

meaningfully and systematically between the sizes of infinite sets” and goes on to explain

how Cantor distinguished between countable infinite sets, or sets that “can be mapped one

to one onto the set of positive whole numbers[,]” and non-countable sets.19 In other words,

the question of whether or not the items in an infinite set can be counted (that is, lined up

with the numbers one, two, three, and so on) indicates what kind of infinity one is working

with.

I mention these distinctions here because, in addition to building on prior mathematical

innovations, Cantor’s breakthrough recapitulates philosophical treatments of the infinite. As

I will show, the idea of countable infinity draws on Locke’s understanding of counting as

inductive proof, and the notion that there are different kinds of infinity resonates with

Burke’s aesthetic taxonomy of infinite experience. Indeed, Cantor’s mathematical work

appears to have had a philosophical and theological component. Joseph Dauben argues that

“[t]here can be no mistake about Cantor’s identification of his mathematics with some

greater absolute unity in God” and that “[t]he theological side of Cantor’s set theory, though

perhaps irrelevant for understanding its mathematical content, is nevertheless essential for

the full understanding of his theory and why it developed in its early stages as it did.”20

Similarly, tracing Cantor’s understanding of the “absolute infinite,” Ignacio Jané claims that

“[t]he true infinite is, for Cantor, absolutely unlimited: it is the absolute infinite, or simply the

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absolute” and goes on to explain how this concept, “[a]lthough of theological origin,” informs

Cantor’s mathematical projects.21 In these ways, Cantor’s proof of infinity captures the spirit

of the crisis that it concludes.

We turn now to this crisis. Infinity existed in the mathematical sphere as well as in the

cultural imagination long before the development of classical analysis. In fact, the century or

so preceding 1810 might be termed the “crisis of infinity” for the preponderance of

formulations, definitions, and debates conceptualizing infinity as mathematically necessary,

logically problematic, and religiously and philosophically inflected. The Romantic period

signaled the expansion of this discourse field into the aesthetic realm and, by extension, into

literary history. Thus, when we anachronistically project a stable definition of the word,

“infinity,” onto Romantic period literature, we sideline a broad band of intellectual-historical

influence and we open up gaps in our critical understanding as well.

To state that infinity achieved no stable definition during the Romantic period is by no

means to suggest that the word lacked a semantic presence in the age’s marketplace of ideas.

Rather than invent for the term a stable definition which in fact it acquired only later, I will

restore to our knowledge the many problems, questions, and debates associated with the

concept, for these are the mediations through which the term circulated and evolved. By

analyzing and contextualizing these debates, we recover some aspects and themes of the

aesthetics of infinity, or the extent to which mathematicians, philosophers and poets account

for, interpret, or formulate infinity based on sensuous experience. Such analysis suggests

that we can only fully understand the complexity and dynamism of the Romantic sublime in

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terms of and in relation to Romantic infinity. Put another way, such analysis suggests that

infinity is the lost category of Romantic aesthetics.

It is one of the great paradoxes of mathematical history that calculus predates a strong

definition of infinity. Calculus is based on the idea of limits, and limits require their

opposite—that which is not bounded. Newtonian calculus finesses the problem of an

unfounded infinity by devising a method for recognizing and predicting infinity effects. This

method is called fluxion theory, and it forms an important chapter in the history of

mathematics. As Niccolò Guicciardini explains, fluxion theory never generated a logically

rigorous system, nor did Newton even make the attempt. Fluxion theory constituted a set of

“successful problem-solving techniques” that Newton “did not attempt to systematize into a

logical structure” and understood to be “in the end nondemonstrative.”22 In the context of

Newtonian calculus, fluxion theory operated as a highly successful set of tools rather than a

paradigm—a praxis rather than a bona fide theory. Fluxion theory stood in for those aspects

of the calculus that could not be understood in the absence of a mathematically developed

concept of infinity.

In mathematical terms, fluxion theory refers to a methodology with which to consider the

rate at which a function changes at a given moment, what we would now call the derivative

of the function at a given moment.3 A primary effect of fluxion theory is to allow certain

values to disappear when a derivative is taken. What in the lexicon of contemporary calculus !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!3 In other words, assessing and visualizing the rate of change of a function at any given moment allows one to visualize the behavior of a more complicated function in terms of a straight line at a given point. From The Princeton Companion to Mathematics: “The derivative of a function f at a value a is usually presented as a number that measures the rate of change of f(x) as x passes through a [...] a general function can behave in very complicated ways, but if it can be approximated by a linear function, then at least in small regions of n-dimensional space its behavior is much easier to understand.” [Timothy Gowers, June Baroow-Green, and Imre Leader, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 33.]

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we would now call “the limit of the ratio of the changes” Newton was thus able to describe

as “the ultimate ratio of the changes.”23 In other words, the results of what we now

understand to be a ratio approaching zero—for example, consider the fraction 1/x, which

approaches zero as x approaches infinity—could be implemented with the same results (1/x

disappearing) without directly engaging with the idea of x increasing with infinity as its limit.

As this example indicates, before the advent of a stable definition of infinity, there could be

no concept of approaching infinity, and thus no concept of zero as a limit. Fluxion theory

picks up the slack for this failing by allowing parts of a function to disappear. In this way,

fluxion theory shows an operational field for infinity, however undefined the concept. By

allowing mathematical phrases to disappear, this operational field makes zero possible.4

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!4!The 1795 printing of William Blake’s There is No Natural Religion claims that “The desire of/Man being Infi-/nite the possession/ is Infinite & him-/self Infinite”; under the “self Infinite,” the figure of a man rises up from a tableaux of clouds, his arms spread wide. [William Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books (New York: Thames & Hudson in Association with The William Blake Trust, 2004), 38.] The document concludes:

Application He who sees the in- -finite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only [plate break] Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is (Ibid., 39-41)

Introducing his monograph on Blake and Newton, Stuart Peterfreund states that “[t]he evidence for Blake’s having read widely and deeply in Newtonian literature is extensive […] there is accordingly no need to reargue the issue of Blake’s degree of familiarity with Newtonian thought.” [Stuart Peterfreund, William Blake in a Newtonian World: Essays on Literature as Art and Science (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 27.] Kevin Hutchings argues that “[…] Blake all too often fails to differentiate Newton’s historical legacy from Newton’s actual work, unfairly blaming the scientist himself for the uses to which his work had been put by the mechanists, deists, and atomists who appropriated and modified its ideas.” [Kevin Hutchings, Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics (Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 123-4.] Setting aside

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In The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero, Robert Kaplan offers a somewhat dramatized

interpretation of the process by which Newton developed his fluxion theory:

In 1665, when Newton was in his early twenties, the plague swept through London and his university, Cambridge. He hid himself away at his family’s country house and set about solving the mysteries of motion. He was to say later that these were the two most fruitful years of his life. Like his teacher Barrow, he thought in terms of infinitesimals, lifting the symbol “o” for them from a shrewd Scotsman, James Gregory. […] Once back in his rooms at Trinity College (where he lived, ironically, a secret Unitarian)—surrounded as chaotically as Dürer’s Melancholia by his tools of astronomy and alchemy, his lenses, retorts, hermetic texts and calculations—he slightly but significantly transmuted his terms. He still did what we saw done before: deleting (or as he said, “expunging”) negligibly small terms from his equations; but these he came to think of not as infinitely small quantities in space but as points of time, calling them “moments.” Under the guise of removing the harshness (as he put it) from the doctrine of indivisibles, a more dynamic point of view was emerging. Did this happen continuously or in the twinkling of an eye? All we have are these little glimpses. The last one is stunning: he rejects dropping terms involving his o, since “in mathematics,” he says, “the minutest errors are not to be neglected.” He drops instead the whole notion of infinitesimals, whether spatial or temporal: “I consider mathematical quantities… not as consisting of very small parts, but as described by a continuous motion.” Curves, in fact, are generated by continuously moving points: “These geneses really take place in the nature of things, and are daily seen in the motion of bodies.” Names he had previously invented for the variable (“fluent”) and its changes (“fluxion”), now, as his x’s and y’s flowed, came fully into their own. “Barrow’s differential triangle”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!the critical discourse on Blake’s attitude towards Newton, it is possible to read the above excerpt as a commentary on fluxion theory. Fluxion theory involves the disappearance of ratios caused by the operations of an undefined infinity (recall the example of 1/x, which approaches zero when x approaches infinity). In There is No Natural Religion, man’s desire, and therefore self, is infinite. However, to see one’s own infinity in and as the infinity of God, one must focus on infinity in all things. Focusing on the ratio itself—a ratio that, in Newtonian calculus, disappears in the face of a mysterious infinity—leads to a myopic self-centeredness and ignorance of both the infinite and the divine. These observations provide counterpoint and complement to Donald Ault’s claim that “for Blake Newton’s fluxions, with their infinitely divisible ‘Moments’ which generate finite ‘Particles of Time’ in which discrete solid atoms find their freedom to move, are the perfect symbol for the Satanic union of the fluctuating and the solid. For, although Newton’s fluxions do not have the characteristic of erratic instability or, on the other hand, oscillatory and cyclic recurrence, they do have the characteristic of ultimate imaginative indefiniteness, at the very point they should be most definite—at the point of the generation of ‘action’ in the world.” [Donald Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975), 134.] !

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became “evanescent.” Just as an error shows up everywhere in a proof made transparent, so does the underlying premise of a life seen from the right angle. Newton’s insistence on asking not what something is but how it acts is all of a piece with his making motion fundamental.24

Kaplan’s colorful explanation of fluxion theory emphasizes Newton’s focus on action and

effect, rather than on definition. While Kaplan is less interested in infinity than in zero, in

the calculus, the two concepts go hand in hand. Another history of fluxion theory, by

mathematical historian Carl B. Boyer, emphasizes some of the complications inherent in

Newton’s methods:

[…] Newton first had in mind infinitely small quantities which are not finite

nor yet precisely zero. “Ghosts of departed quantities” they were fittingly called by the critics of the method in the following century. [Berkeley coined this particular phrase.] These offer too great difficulty of conception, so Newton next focused attention on their ratio, which in general is a finite number. Knowing this ratio, one may now substitute for the infinitesimal quantities forming it any other easily conceived finite magnitudes having the same ratio, such as quantities which are thought of as velocities or fluxions of those entering into the equation […] Although Newton apparently preferred to link his method of fluxions with the idea of a limiting ratio, he so often used infinitesimals for dispatch that we shall find many of his successors later interpreting the fluxions themselves as infinitely small quantities, confusing them with moments.25

Considering fluxion theory as a series or system of infinity effects allows us to recognize the

extent to which Newton’s calculus operates in a tradition of thinking about the affective

experience of infinity. If, as critics have argued, Newton’s mathematics is another

expression of his theological and alchemical writings, then Newton’s mathematical treatment

of the problems and paradoxes of infinity is already aesthetically, spiritually, and culturally

inflected. Indeed, the argument that Newton’s mathematics is just one branch in the

expression of a larger intellectual project dominates recent criticism.

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For example, Scott Mandelbrote considers the connections among Newton’s alchemical,

religious, and scientific texts in order to argue that language links them and shows us how

they are all revelations of the same interpretation of truth:

As alchemist and Arian theologian, Newton felt he belonged among a

remnant, chosen by God, capable of restoring knowledge through the interpretation of difficult and corrupted texts. To do this, he taught himself the secret languages of the adepts and the prophets, as he had taught himself the secret language of mathematics, in which the book of nature was written.26

In a similar vein, Ayval Ramati Leshem in a 2001 article argues that fluxion theory represents

a specific spiritual process for Newton:

[…] Newton might have perceived his mathematical method of fluxions as a divine path through which humans can purify their distorted bodily senses. The method of fluxions calculates distortions undergone by equable flowing quantities, each calculation restoring momentarily the pure divine objective flow from which the flux of the distorted curve has deviated. The method of fluxions once embedded in physics enables human beings to purify their senses momentarily and converge, finitely, with God's infinite objective Sensorium.27

Paralleling this potentially divisive claim is Ramati Leshem’s argument, in her 2003

monograph, that “Newton’s method of fluxions functions also as an epistemological method

purifying the mind from material distractions.”28 According to Ramati Leshem, Newton’s

religiosity is inextricably bound up with fluxion theory. Leshem claims, in an early chapter,

that “without considering Newton’s strong preference for quantities that flow equably in

relation to absolute time over those whose fluxion undergoes change, I will not be able to

argue that the inherent hidden mechanical design of bodies had for him a structure that gave

content and explanation to the true worship of the original religion of Noah and his sons

around the sacrificial fire.”29

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Offering yet another interpretation of the religious overtones of Newton’s fluxion theory, M.

Hughes argues that Newton is either an Arianist or influenced by Arianism, and that the

debate between Newton and Berkeley is really a debate about God.5 Hughes sums up as

follows:

[…] though all these controversies were pursued by Newton, Berkeley and their contemporaries in a religious spirit not widely shared now, none were introverted controversies caused only by religious belief. They reflect a philosophical dispute continued since ancient times which, because at root it concerns the nature of power and because the concept of power is of such importance, will always raise conflicting opinions both in religion and in science.30

Scholars seeking to develop a holistic understanding of Newton’s work highlight the extent

to which the historical importance of Newton’s fluxion theory is not limited to the

development of the calculus. Such critical investments in the humanistic overtones of

Enlightenment thought reveal continuities between Enlightenment rationality and the

Romantic imagination, and the concept of infinity proves an intersection between the two.

Recent scholarship on the subject of Newton’s fluxion theory, by suggesting that every

infinity effect is also an infinity affect, thus underscores the extent to which fluxion theory not

only stands in for infinity but also stands for infinity, a concept under cultural interrogation,

debate, and surveillance. Indeed, scholarly debates on the subject of Newton’s fluxion

theory render it impossible to separate the ways in which Newton “minded Mathematicks &

Philosophy[.]”31 Perhaps the best we can claim, then, is that to inherit or respond to

Newton’s treatments of the topic of infinity is to inherit or respond to a problem at once

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!5 Hughes defines Arianism as “the rejection of any idea of interdependence between God and creatures”; a more straightforward definition of Arianism is the belief that Christ is not divine. [M. Hughes, “Newton, Hermes and Berkeley,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43, no. 1 (Mar., 1992): 15.]

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philosophical, religious, and, as I will show, aesthetic. Those minor fractures in Newton’s

mathematics that fan out from the intellectual-historical crisis of infinity described above

both divide and connect method and result, mathematics and philosophy. Recent critical

interpretations suggest that, in attacking Newton’s use of infinity in the calculus as heretical,

George Berkeley responds to the extent to which the mathematical discussion is invested in

a dynamic field of philosophical and religious debate.

Finally, whatever its stake in such debates, Newton’s fluxion theory anticipates certain trends

in aesthetic theories that respond to the same problems and paradoxes of infinity. Certain

models of the Romantic sublime, not unlike Newton’s fluxion theory, ask not what infinity

is, but what infinity does. When we arrive at the final stanza of The Last of the Flock, we cannot

know whether the man’s children exist or not. In either case, the lyrical ballad tells a story of

their disappearance.

III. The Analyst & The Arti f i c ia l Inf ini te : Berkeley & Burke

Published seven years after Newton’s death, Berkeley’s 1734 critique of calculus, The Analyst,

argues that the unfounded nature of calculus goes so far as to upset the difference between

scientific knowledge and religious faith. Berkeley states that “he who can digest a second or

third Fluxion, a second or third Difference, need not, methinks, be squeamish about any

Point in Divinity[,]” asking, “with what appearance of Reason shall any Man presume to say,

that Mysteries may not be Objects of Faith, at the same time that he himself admits such

obscure Mysteries to be the Object of Science?”32 Alongside his clear religious agenda of

proving hypocritical the ways in which science distances or discounts religion, Berkeley gets

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at the core problem of Newtonian calculus. Indeed, responding to a rejoinder to The Analyst,

Berkeley states that even if no mathematicians were, in his opinion, “Infidels,” “my Remarks

upon Fluxions are not the less true; nor will it follow, that I have no Right to examine them

on the Foot of Humane Science, even though Religion were quite unconcerned[.]”33

In order to trace reinventions of infinity from Newtonian calculus to Romantic aesthetics, I

look at The Analyst in concert with Burke’s formulation of the sublime in terms of infinity.

Just as Berkeley’s illustration of infinity as both undefined and philosophically resonant helps

us to historicize Burke’s theory of the sublime, so too does Burke historicize Berkeley

insofar as Burke’s aesthetic philosophy helps us consider the extent to which Berkeley’s

mathematical treatises center on an emotional and spiritual reaction to a concept that

transcends the concerns of mathematics.

Berkeley’s challenge to Newton’s calculus is at once poetic, philosophical, and mathematical.

In one particularly dramatic passage of The Analyst, Berkeley writes that the mathematicians

in question:

[…] scruple not to say, that by the help of these new Analytics they can penetrate into Infinity itself: That they can even extend their Views beyond Infinity: That their art comprehends not only Infinite, but Infinite of Infinite (as they express it) or an Infinity of Infinites. But, notwithstanding all these Assertions and Pretentions, it may be justly questioned whether, as other Men in other Inquiries are often deceived by Words or Terms, so they likewise are not wonderfully deceived and deluded by their own peculiar Signs, Symbols, or Species […] But if we remove the Veil and look underneath, if laying aside the Expressions we set ourselves attentively to consider the things themselves, which are supposed to be expressed or

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marked thereby, we shall discover much Emptiness, Darkness, and Confusion;6 nay, if I mistake not, direct Impossibilities and Contradictions.34

While Berkeley’s critique resulted in a strong effort to ground the calculus in logical proof,

we recall that this mathematical project was not accomplished until Georg Cantor’s

foundational paper of 1874.35 Berkeley’s intense philosophical reaction to the crisis of

infinity can help us to contextualize other philosophical responses to this wayward concept.

Such a long view of philosophical treatments of infinity illuminates the intellectual-historical

conditions under which Burke posits infinity as one cause of sublime experience in his 1756

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. We see, for

example, that Burke draws on a particular concept of infinity as available for proof and

definition as the sublime itself. In so doing, he not only anticipates the rigorous discourse

that will eventually lead to the concept’s mathematical definition but also begins to establish

its aesthetic definitions, the very definitions that are most relevant when the term appears in

Romantic literature.

From the inconceivability of a “complete whole” (arrived at by infinite addition, i.e. a

conglomerate) and of a “perfect unity” (arrived at by infinite division, i.e. a state in which

everything is the same, broken down into its most basic parts), Burke arrives at a theory

about the ways in which even thinking about infinity can lead one to experience the sublime:

Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror,

which is the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime. There are scarce any things which can become the objects of our senses that are really, and in their own nature infinite. But the eye not being able to perceive the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!6 These terms may call to mind certain passages in which Burke cites terror, obscurity, and power as potential causes of sublime experience. [Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. David Womersley (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), part II, sects. i-iv.]

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bounds of many things, they seem to be infinite, and they produce the same effects as if they were really so. We are deceived in the like manner, if the parts of some large object are so continued to any indefinite number, that the imagination meets no check which may hinder its extending them at pleasure.36

Infinity, according to Burke, is a sublime form of self-deception. It involves both a sense of

how things might be, and a sense of how to position oneself so as to make things seem as if

they were that way.7 Just as, situated below Mont Blanc, Shelley's poem rejoices in its blind

spots—“the snows descend/Upon that mountain; none beholds them there”37—the seeker

of the Burkean sublime must position himself such that some finite thing appears to be

unbounded if he is to achieve the desired effect/affect. Similarly, something can repeat ad

apparent infinitum, a notion from which Burke derives his idea of the “artificial infinite,” the

“[s]uccession and uniformity of parts” that “impress the imagination with an idea of their

progress beyond their actual limits” and “stamp on bounded objects the character of

infinity.”38 The concept of seemingly endless repetition leading to an idea (however partial)

of infinity Burke borrows from Locke, who claims in An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding that the “endless addition [...] of numbers [...] is that which gives us the clearest

and most distinct idea of infinity.”39 For Burke, this phenomenon leads us to have a very

specific and intense aesthetic experience, that of the sublime, which Burke defines as “the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!7 This aspect of the Burkean sublime may call to mind analogous theories of the picturesque. Dabney Townsend writes, “[t]hose who use the term [picturesque] mose prominently in a self-conciously theoretical way—Gilpin, Price, and Knight—are most concerned with their own responses, and, for the latter two, the way that they will form their own country estates [...] Gilpin and Price seize on Burke’s references to smoothness and size but do not fully understand the underlying philosophical psychology from which Burke derives his categories. So while Burke begins with basic premises about the relation of pleasure to fundamental individual and social human desires, Price sees only a set of categories identified in terms of their causes.” (Townsend refers to Burke’s aesthetics more generally.) [Dabney Townsend, “The Picturesque,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Col. 55, No. 4 (Autumn, 1997): 366.]

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strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling[,]” the experience of “danger or

pain” at “certain distances, and with certain modifications” striking one as “delightful.”40

Along with Burke’s implication that actual and fabricated infinities may coexist—we recall

that “scarce” as opposed to “no” things are really infinite—Burke's critique rhetorically folds

into itself a subtle taxonomy of infinities. Consider the following sampling of quotations:

“the stars lie in such apparent confusion [...] This gives them the advantage of a sort of

infinity”41; “unless you can produce an appearance of infinity by your disorder, you will have

disorder only without magnificence”42; “The modifications of sound [...] are almost

infinite”43; “hardly any thing can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make

some sort of approach towards infinity”44; “Infinity, though of another kind, causes much of

our pleasure in agreeable, as well as of our delight in sublime, images.”45 Hedging his claims,

Burke discusses infinity as indeterminate, fractured, and multiple. Here we see a sort of

infinity, an appearance of infinity, the almost infinite, some sort of approach towards infinity, another kind of

infinity. Burke’s infinity is fixed neither conceptually nor rhetorically. The sublime

experience following from such an abstraction is equally abstract and multiple. Speaking of

the “passion caused by the great and sublime in nature[,]” Burke first claims that one will

experience “astonishment”; he then builds on this claim by explaining that “astonishment is

that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.”46

The soul frozen in horror, the mind can neither think about nor distract itself from the

sublime object: “In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot

entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.”47 In terms

of this astonishment, Burke describes the relationship between the sublime and human

reason:

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Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect.48

To have a sort of how-to guide describing how things produce an experience that anticipates

reasoning is to reasonably anticipate the anticipation of reason. Sublime experience, by this

description, stands in paradoxical relation to reasoning. To put further pressure here, we

might wonder just what Burke means by “anticipates”—in addition to coming before

reasoning, could this imply that the sublime experience does what the mind will do when it

regains its cognitive capacities? Does the sublime experience itself think, or represent a

thought event? In addition to anticipating our reasonings, Burke states that the sublime

“hurries us on,” which, in this context, could mean that the sublime experience causes one

to think. Burke goes on to explain the payoff of the sublime, stating that the “effect of the

sublime in its highest degree” is astonishment; admiration, reverence, and respect are

“inferior effects.” What makes astonishment a “higher” effect than admiration, reverence,

and respect? One possible explanation of the difference lies in noticing that, of these

possible effects, only astonishment seems to be unreasonable. While admiration, reverence,

and respect seem to describe a state of regained rationality, astonishment lingers in the space

of the mind overtaken. Speaking of the sublime effect in literature, Burke describes a

moment in which he notices “two ideas not presentable but by language; and an union of

them great and amazing beyond conception; if they may properly be called ideas which

present no distinct image to the mind[.]”49 In his definition of sublimity, as in his definition

of infinity, Burke grasps for something unreachable—not to render it reachable, not to bring

it down to earth, but rather to recognize it, to stimulate astonishment. Infinity and sublimity,

then, balance on the seam between the irrational and the hyper-rational. They depend on

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one’s ability to trick oneself into perceiving what both is and is not there and then to be

shocked by what one does and does not find. Excusing the payoff of calculus from his

attack, Berkeley writes of a mathematical progression, “by virtue of a twofold mistake you

arrive, though not at Science, yet at Truth. For Science it cannot be called, when you

proceed blindfold, and arrive at the Truth not knowing how or by what means.”50 For

Burke, when we trick ourselves into thinking that we stand in the face of the infinite, we play

a game of apparent cause and effect that may lead us to a sort of emotional transcendence.

We gamble the truth to get to the truth. In the process, it is not the sublime, but rather

infinity that is the illusion, the catalyst of experience, and perhaps the most relevant aesthetic

category.

And although it is historically accurate and critically necessary to read The Analyst as an

informed and impassioned rebuke that underscores some very real problems in mathematics,

another possible interpretation now emerges. This is the theoretically problematic and yet

aesthetically appealing interpretation of Berkeley as observing Newtonian calculus and

thereby experiencing the Burkean sublime. Berkeley’s apparent complaint, for example, that

“[t]he further the Mind analyseth and pursueth these fugitive Ideas, the more it is lost and

bewildered; the Objects, at first fleeting and minute, soon vanishing out of sight”51 speaks to

the astonishment and to the pointless pursuit of a real, grounded infinity that characterizes

this type of sublime experience. We may instead argue that George Berkeley is perhaps the

first of several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers to experience Romantic

infinity as sublimely productive.

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Chapter Two

Counting to Inf ini ty & Discount ing Inf ini ty

I. The Same Numerical Soul : Locke

John Locke’s touchstone formulation of infinity is inextricably linked to issues of self-

identification and self-recognition. In his 1689 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,

Locke argues that the “endless addition […] of numbers […] is that […] which gives us the

clearest and most distinct idea of infinity”52; in a parallel construction, Locke argues that “the

identity of the same man consists […] in nothing but a participation of the same continued

life, by constantly fleeting particles of matter, in succession vitally united to the same

organized body.”53 According to Locke, the idea of infinity emerges when we count, and

this practice is analogous to how we live. Counting, and realizing that we could continue to

count, allows us to believe in infinity; this same process, when the objects counted are

moments that we are ourselves, grants us our sense of identity.

Locke’s chapter-long treatment of identity in the Essay is messy. The mind-body problem,

talking parrots, limb amputation, metempsychosis, and the limits of memory8 confound

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!8 In the chapter Romantic Memory of the 2005 collection The Wordsworthian Enlightenment, Frances Ferguson links Locke’s treatment of the problems of memory to Romantic literature and Romanticist criticism, summing up Locke’s stance as follows: “Locke’s treatment of memory meant that one didn’t have to stake one’s identity on the claim that a particular person must always be able to persuade others—and oneself as well—that one has remained the same person by being characteristic of oneself and, hence, recognizable. The persistence of memory relieved one of the need to continue to look the same or to produce consistent and predictable

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questions of what we can know as and of ourselves. Despite these and other complications,

Locke’s definition of infinity is built around mathematical logic and defined by consistency.

Something has identity, according to Locke, when it is always in the same place at the same

time. Thus, constancy of mind and body makes a man:

For I presume ‘tis not the idea of a thinking or rational being alone, that

makes the idea of a man in most people’s sense; but of a body, so and so shaped, joined to it; and if that be the idea of a man, the same successive body not shifted all at once, must, as well as the same immaterial spirit, go to the making of the same man.54

When this man recognizes the consistency of his various components, he achieves personal

identity:

For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ‘tis that that makes everyone to be what he calls self; and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things; in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being: and as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now it was then; and ‘tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done.55

According to Locke, when we perceive that we remain ourselves from one moment to the

next, we perceive ourselves, as “[s]elf is that conscious thinking thing […] which is sensible,

or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for

itself, as far as that consciousness extends.”56 While “[…] personal identity consists, not in the

identity of substance, but, as I have said, in the identity of consciousness[,]”57 it is that which

remains united to this consciousness that is part of the self.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!patterns of behavior. Locke was, in this, lending his support to a remarkable feature of the philosophy of everyday life—that we don’t imagine that the continuity of an individual’s identity rests on a series of ocular proofs, that we most often take someone who behaves differently from one day to the next to be the same person in a different mood rather than a different person altogether.” [Frances Ferguson, “Romantic Memory,” in The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading, ed. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 71-2.]

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For all the philosophical problems and complications that the concept of identity brings up

for Locke, its underlying truth is a matter of enumeration. We keep track, so to speak, of

our identity, and its consistency proves its existence, which is necessary for the continuity we

observe.

Locke uses this moment-to-moment model to structure his discussion of identity in Book II,

Chapter XXVII: Of Identity and Diversity, but he works out the logic of this model earlier in

Book II, in Chapter XVI: Of Number and Chapter XVII: Of Infinity. According to Locke, the

thinking of complex thoughts is a process of conceptual counting, as “by adding one to one,

we have the complex idea of a couple; by putting twelve units together, we have the complex

idea of a dozen; and of a score, or a million, or any other number.”58 Infinity, that concept

which inflects all divine attributes, is thus intrinsic to every idea that, like number, could be

compounded without end:

[…] all the ideas, that are considered as having parts, and are capable of increase by the addition of any equal or less parts, afford us by their repetition the idea of infinity; because with this endless repetition, there is continued an enlargement, of which there can be no end.59

Locke defines this idea of infinity as “an endless growing idea[,]” a potentially limitless process

of additive conceptualization.60 It is this very process that allows one, not to know infinity in

any positive sense, but to trust in the existence of the unknown. Debunking the possibility

of a positive idea of infinity, Locke writes:

[…] yet there be those, who imagine they have positive ideas of infinite duration and space. It would, I think, be enough to destroy any such positive idea of infinite, to ask him that has it, whether he could add to it or no; which would easily show the mistake of such a positive idea.61

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Infinity, according to Locke, isn’t something we can ever fully know or understand; however,

it is something towards the idea of which we possess a mathematically sound route of

approach. Thus, when we depart from the abstract notion of infinity, which, by extension of

its Godly mechanics, we may take as axiomatic, and approach the philosophical tangle of

personal identity, the possibilities for knowledge expand. We may never know beyond

question that we are not the reincarnation of Caesar or a figment of another man’s dream or

drunkenness or an idiosyncratic cocktail of the substances that be, but the very notion of

consistency will always be consistent. If we could always be ourselves for one more minute,

then we could always be ourselves forever.

By defining identity within the conceptual framework of counting to infinity, Locke departs

from Enlightenment figurations of identity as a derivative of memory and sensation (a

conceptualization epitomized by Hume’s 1739 statement that “memory does not so much

produce as discover personal identity, by shewing us the relation of cause and effect among our

different perceptions”62). Identity-forming memory, for Locke, is a thing experienced as it

accumulates. Ultimately, Locke argues that “[c]ontinued existence makes identity[.]”63 To be

some particular identity is to believe in that identity. That at one point, in the midst of a

discussion of what makes Socrates Socrates, Locke refers to an individual as defined by

having “the same numerical soul”64 speaks to the emphasis on enumeration, continuation,

and corresponding self-awareness at the heart of Locke’s definition of personal identity. For

Locke, the moments that we are ourselves add up to the next moment, which gives rise to a

belief in the infinity of our identity.

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Counting and living, according to Locke, are sister inductions. Thus, Locke’s infinity is

empirical. It is learned, quite literally, by practice. Even before we consider formulations of

the Romantic sublime in terms of their dependence on Locke, we may wonder whether

Locke’s infinity is inherently appealing to crafters of poetry, or lineated writing, or

enumerative verbal art. The leap from accumulation to transcendent concept—days lived to

identity, numbers counted to infinity—resonates with, for example, Shelley’s claims, in A

Defence of Poetry, that “Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; Imagination

the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole […] Poetry, in

a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the Imagination’”65 and that

“[poetry] acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness[.]”66

Whatever Locke’s poetic logic, the influence of Lockean infinity permeates Romantic

aesthetics. Recall our discussion of Edmund Burke’s 1756 A Philosophical Enquiry into the

Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke identifies the “artificial infinite” as the

“[s]uccession and uniformity of parts” that “impress the imagination with an idea of their

progress beyond their actual limits” and “stamp on bounded objects the character of

infinity.”67 Such a pathway towards sublimity is really a game of cause and effect, or

affect—the infinite itself, or the supposed infinite, is the feeling that comes from a

progression that appears to be indefinite.

Turning to another model, we can see Locke’s version of infinity forming the foundation of

the Mathematical Sublime described in Kant’s 1790 Critique of Judgment. Kant states that

“[n]ature [...] is sublime in such of its phenomena as in their intuition convey the idea of their

infinity.”68 The mathematical sublime occurs when one encounters something of great

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magnitude and is moved to try to comprehend infinity, which is impossible, because “the

infinite is absolutely (not merely comparatively) great” and thus “the mere ability even to

think it as a whole indicates a faculty of mind transcending every standard of the senses.”69

One perceives that which inspires thoughts of infinity, realizes that these are impossible

thoughts, and yet also self-reflexively realizes the powers of one’s mind in the face of the

concept of infinity. And this is the sublime: “where the size of a natural object is such that

the imagination spends its whole faculty of comprehension upon it in vain [...] instead of the

object, it is rather the disposition of the mind in estimating it that we have to judge as

sublime.”70 As opposed to seeing something as if it were infinite and thereby experiencing the

powerful emotion that is the sublime, as in Burke’s formulation, here one sees something,

tries to imagine it as infinite, cannot, and is left, sublimely, with both the ungraspable

concept of infinity and an awareness of one's own working mind. For Locke, the

impossibility of comprehending infinity allows one to believe in infinity. For Kant, the

impossibility of comprehending infinity creates a moment of self-reflexivity at which we can

locate the Mathematical Sublime. As in Locke’s formulation, the moment of recognizing

that one’s counting will never reach infinity is the moment of self-realization.

Let us pause for a moment to situate this argument within critical discussions of Locke and

Romanticism. In The Self in Social Theory, C. Fred Alford argues:

What is valuable about Locke’s account [of the self] is its emphasis on

process, the way in which we must constantly appropriate and reappropriate our experiences in order to ensure what [critic John] Jenkins refers to as the survival of identity. The self is […] a process in which we reinterpret the meaning of the past in terms of the events and crises of the present (particularly as these impact upon our ambitions and ideals) in order to project ourselves into the future—that is, to see the meaning of going on, the purpose of our lives, and ultimately the meaning of our deaths.”71

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Alford’s use of the word “project” contains an interesting double entendre—for Locke, the

self is both project and projection. It is a thing one makes in time. The idea that human

understanding is the creation of one’s own self generates a reading of Locke’s

groundbreaking formulation of identity (“in contrast to the mechanical self in Hobbes’

account, and the ‘bundle’ of self in Hume’s”72) as an artistic manifesto. Defining identity,

Locke sets out a formula for self-creation. So perhaps it is unsurprising that Locke’s

influence on nineteenth-century aesthetic theory doesn’t stop at the sublime but rather takes

root in the poetry itself. Locke connects his “genuinely revolutionary” “account of personal

identity” to his contribution to Enlightenment debates about infinity.73 In so doing, Locke

not only creates a version of infinity of particular use to aesthetic formulations of the

Romantic sublime but also inspires poetic remakings of his ideas about identity in an

historical period over the course of which the popularity of his philosophy is far less

consistent than the degree of its literary impact.

By citing the Essay’s literary effects, my argument engages two fairly recent studies of Locke

and Romanticism, both of which critique the equation of empiricism with conceptual

stability and call for a more nuanced understanding of An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding as a (to greater or lesser extents) literary text. Cathy Caruth’s 1991 Empirical

Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud argues that one must reread

Empiricism in order to approach afresh the vocabulary of Romanticism. Calling Locke’s

influence on Romanticist criticism a problem of oversimplification, Caruth points out that

“[a] number of interpretations of English Romantic texts depend on an approach to

empiricism which neglects the complexities of individual arguments as well as the

peculiarities of the tradition as a whole”74 and states the necessity of finding “a way of talking

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about empirical philosophies not just as doctrines but as texts” so that “we might consider

new ways of reading the self-meditations of Romantic texts as well […] A rereading of

empiricism, in other words, can open up our ideas of self-understanding insofar as it is an

essential part of the interpretive vocabulary of Romantic poetry.”75 Answering Caruth’s

insistence that Locke’s texts are just that, the present study argues that there is great formal

consistency between Locke’s writings about infinity and identity and several Romantic and

later poetic formulations of this conceptual interplay.

In a similar vein, William Walker’s 1994 Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy attends to the

ways in which Locke’s Essay is simplified in its literary-critical applications. In defense of

nuance, Walker states, “It is, in part, because I find the Essay to be complicated in certain ways

that I challenge the authority that this text wields within studies of post-Renaissance

literature.”76 Walker goes on to argue that “the dualism in relation to which Romanticism is

commonly defined is the product of a particular reading of Locke, one which represses

precisely those images which Romanticism is then seen to formulate as the abrogation of this

dualism.”77 Thus, Walker argues that the simplification of Locke’s ideas obscures certain

parallels between Locke’s writings and the writings of Romanticism. While the chapter at

hand uses Locke’s definition of infinity to clarify certain nineteenth-century poetic

formulations, it does so not to make Locke into a monolithic figurehead but rather to take

his definition of infinity as one among many in a period specific spoil of shifting definitions.

Although Locke’s formulation of infinity is in no way definitive, it is a particularly common

model to be taken up by nineteenth-century poetry. This may be the case for logistical

reasons (e.g. Wordsworth’s interest in Locke’s infinity and introduction of this version of

infinity to the poetic realm) or on account of Locke’s concerns (e.g. connections among

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selfhood, divinity, the other, and the infinite). In any case, understanding Locke’s

formulation of infinity becomes necessary if one wishes to clarify certain nineteenth-century

poems.

Beyond calling for a literary-critical recuperation of Locke’s complexity, both Caruth and

Walker suggest that we attend to the literariness of Locke’s treatise when applying it to

literature. Beyond highlighting certain similarities between the openness of Locke’s text and

the texture of Romantic poetry, Walker interprets Locke’s definition of mind as one that

“opens the possibility for, but does not demand, a narrative about the mental agent.”78

Caruth is more explicit in this regard, arguing that “Locke’s empiricism takes the form of a

narrative, a narrative that tells a very specific tale about itself […] empirical arguments, as we

understand them, have very little in common with their experiential descriptions; it is

precisely by means of the vocabulary of experience, I suggest, that the narratives of

Romantic literature question their own referential status.”79 Using Locke’s formulation of

infinity in terms of identity in order to understand parallel moves in nineteenth-century

poetry means recognizing commonalities between empiricist and poetic logic, between

philosophical and literary problems, and between the problems and the poetics of infinity.

However groundbreaking the studies in question, it is worth noting that Ernest Lee

Tuveson’s 1960 tract arguing that Locke’s texts may be understood as the basis of several

key Romantic figurations was critiqued along these same lines some fifty years ago. In a

review of The Imagination as a Means of Grace in The Philosophical Review (1961), A. C. Baier

argues that “[Tuveson] rather argues in a quite a priori way that what they wrote is what one

would expect to be written after Locke […] from another selection of writers, or from

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another interpretation of these same writers, a different pattern of development could

equally plausibly be exhibited.”80 In a somewhat parallel review from Modern Language Notes

(1961), M. H. Abrams argues that, “[h]aving made the prior decision to narrate the history of

prominent aesthetic ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth century solely in terms of Locke's

scheme of the mind, independently of relevant earlier thought, or of contemporary

developments in English and Continental philosophy departing radically from Locke,

Tuveson is constrained to attribute to his one available source, by analogies however remote

and tenuous, the ultimate responsibility for concepts with which Locke did not deal at all, or

which he explicitly denied.”81 Thus, while Caruth and Walker challenge a simplification of

Locke’s text that in turn simplifies the terms of Romanticism, they not only counter certain

trends in Romanticism but also participate in a long-established tradition of advocating the

restoration of Locke’s complexity to Romanticist studies.

II. Nothing Less Than Inf ini ty

In the 1810 essay Upon Epitaphs, Wordsworth applies Locke’s logical formulation of infinity

to his justification for belief in the afterlife. Wordsworth explains this belief by presenting a

verbal diagram of a child watching a stream that continues and continues to flow. Realizing

that the stream has an inexhaustible source, the child is made to think of the ocean, but this

body of water is invested with a special significance:

Origin and tendency are notions inseparably co-relative. Never did a child stand by the side of a running stream, pondering within himself what power was the feeder of the perpetual current, from what never-wearied sources the body of water was supplied, but he must have been inevitably propelled to follow this question by another: “Towards what abyss is it in progress? what receptacle can contain the mighty influx?” And the spirit of the answer must

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have been, though the word might be sea or ocean, accompanied perhaps with an image gathered from a map, or from the real object in nature—these might have been the letter, but the spirit of the answer must have been as inevitably, —a receptacle without bounds or dimensions;—nothing less than infinity.82

Infinity, then, is already a contradiction, both an inherently paradoxical receptacle without

bounds or dimensions and the very “real,” bounded, dimensional sea (or a drawn image

thereof). In the analogy through which Wordsworth investigates how we understand our

origin and the ever-after towards which we ultimately tend, he both borrows Locke's logical

framework and gives its end result an illogical yet sensible translation—that believing in an

endless source demands an “answer” that is something different in “letter” than in “spirit,”

both an “image gathered from a map, or from the real object in nature” and “nothing less

than infinity.” Such conceptual play recasts the connection Locke draws between the

mathematically infinite and the singular human life. For Locke, infinity is both a grand

abstraction and a simple faith in the self as such. For Wordsworth, the two aren’t so

different.9

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!9 Dewey W. Hall discusses this passage in his 2001 article “Signs of the Dead: Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and the Discourse of the Self,” in which he claims that “Essays upon Epitaphs is a metaphysical inquiry about death which links the act of dying to that of writing.” [Dewey W. Hall, "Signs of the Dead: Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and the Discourse of the Self," ELH 68, no. 3 (Fall, 2001): 658.] When the passage at hand is taken as part of a statement of poetics, Hall argues, we see that “Wordsworth’s concern with ‘remembrance’ reveals anxiety over the state of forgetfulness—the dead people slip into oblivion and cease to exist. The absolute end of life begins with absolutely forgetting the dead; whereas, remembrance retains the past for the sake of the future.” [Ibid.] Thus, Hall reads our passage as follows:

The quest after origins involves the search for an ideal language to express poetic inspiration. Wordsworth’s trope of a “running stream” in a “perpetual” state of “influx” indicates the idea of meditating upon the forward drift of a memory by looking backward to its “never-wearied” source. The “body of water” becomes an interminable source of linear movement through space and time. According to Wordsworth, this source cannot be contained except in a word—“a receptacle without bounds or dimensions” […] For Wordsworth, human language, boundlessly and limitlessly aspiring toward infinitude, becomes the intermediary between origin and its endpoint. The beginning of the end starts with the language of the living and finishes in the epitaphic mode—a ventriloquism of the dead. (Ibid., 659.)

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Applying Locke’s logic to Upon Epitaphs reveals that this passage expresses not only an

artistic desire for the infinite but also a logical belief in the existence of the infinite. Beyond

a desire to counter, immortalize, or embody mortal anxieties in language, this passage

transposes the logic by which Locke proves the existence of infinity, or at least convinces his

reader to believe in the infinite. That the stream continues to flow means that it could

always continue to flow; that the child continues to be himself is proof enough of the infinite

spirit given by God, and of the reality of an infinite receptacle for that spirit in the afterlife.

Here is a statement, not only of poetics, but also of faith—of a faith bolstered by a certain

Enlightenment model of thinking through the mathematical qualities of identity.

III. The Good Minute Goes

Tracing Locke’s infinity through the nineteenth century clarifies certain poetic considerations

of identity and expands an account of Locke’s nineteenth-century reception to include his

influence on verbal art, an influence mediated by the poetic inheritance of Romanticism.

Crafting such a literary history also emphasizes the extent to which Locke conceptualizes

identity as process—whether that process be philosophical, psychological, or artistic. Identity,

like infinity, is something that happens in the accumulation of everyday details:

When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions: and by this everyone is to himself that which he calls self […]83

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While Hall helpfully contextualizes this allegory within questions of artistic form and inspiration, understanding the extent to which Upon Epitaphs responds to Locke’s infinity reveals some of the text’s broader philosophical stakes.!

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According to Locke, doing what one does, and knowing that one does what one does,

produces an experience of selfhood. Thus, the moment-by-moment progression of life gives

rise to a belief in continuous identity, and self-awareness and consciousness at every regular

moment reinforce this sense of identity and fill in a picture of the self. For Locke, selfhood

is at once infinite and quotidian.

Locke’s link between the repetitive and the transcendent is further dramatized in his

description of how, through enumeration, one might worship the divine. At the beginning

of his chapter on infinity, Locke writes:

For when we call them [i.e. God’s attributes] infinite, we have no other idea of this infinity, but what carries with it some reflection on, and intimation of that number or extent of the acts or objects of God’s power, wisdom, and goodness, which can never be supposed so great, or so many, which these attributes will not always surmount and exceed, let us multiply them in our thoughts, as far as we can, with all the infinity of endless number.84

Here, even prayer happens through counting—let us multiply them in our thoughts, as far as we

can. Locke emphasizes the connection between the doable and the transcendent, between

repetition and revelation.

Remaking Lockean infinity as a mode of response to romantic longing, Robert Browning’s

Two in the Campagna reckons with an ever-frustrated desire to embody the infinite in the

finite, imagining a landscape within which love is inscribed and figuring thoughts as elusive

and tangible. The poem ultimately offers a definition of love and a corresponding definition

of a love poem that embrace the frustrations of finitude as both forever distinct from and

responsible for the possibility of the infinite.

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Two in the Campagna provides a mathematical definition of the struggles of love, or the

struggles of one finite being aching to contain and to be contained by another finite being.

The first line of the poem, “I wonder do you feel to-day[,]” enfolds the phrase “I one, you

two,” and then moves to the one-to-one connection or identification of the second line: “As

I have felt since, hand in hand[.]”85 At its outset, then, the poem identifies the love object as

a separate, countable being, and then attempts to identify with it, to highlight a point of

similarity and connection. Examples of the attempt to add up I and you, or to bring one and

two together, occur throughout the poem. In the third stanza, for example, the phrase

“yonder weed/took up the floating weft” invokes the homonym “we’d,” or “we would,”

thereby implying that not only the weed but also the couple would take up weaving—

stitching themselves together. Another expression of this desire occurs in the seventh

stanza, where the easy idiom “How say you?” connotes, not only a request for permission,

but also the question, “How do I say you?” While the poem thus acknowledges the

difficulty of understanding or expressing the other as such, it also denies that such

recognition is a choice, asking: “How is it under our control/To love or not to love?” (VII).

The poem depicts the struggles of love as endlessly frustrating. The two cannot weave into

one, and no matter how much the I says you, such a process of worship can never be all-

encompassing. The poem laments the limitations of the other, and the failure of the other

to serve as a totalizing force of love: “I would that you were all to me,/You that are just so

much, no more./Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!” (VIII). Thus bemoans the lover

who cannot “Set my heart/beating by yours” (IX) or fully render “your part my part” (IX).

The countable I and you, or one and two, cannot contain the infinity of love, and so it is in a

decidedly singular first-person construction—one that asks you to discern or separate only

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the I—that the poem concludes, “Only I discern—/Infinite passion, and the pain/Of finite

hearts that yearn” (XII).

The poem’s portrayal of the lover’s struggle to contain the infinite is also a statement of

poetics. Take, for example, a passage in which Two in the Campagna discusses the lover’s

frustration at not being able to hold on to a beautiful moment of connection with the

beloved: “Then the good minute goes./XI/Already how am I so far/Out of that minute?”

The transitional poetic moment occurs over a stanza break. The good minute going, then,

chimes with a roman numeral; the reader may feel as if she has looked up at a clock. In this

way, the poem announces its own physicality, its own attempt, by ticking time and focusing

on number, to hold within it love—to be, quite literally, a love poem. That the interrupting

number is composed of an X and an I furthers this interpretation, as the number itself

embodies the exclusion of the I. Further examples of self-referentiality occur throughout

the poem: in the second stanza, the interruption of “for rhymes” seems to be inserted for

the very purpose of rhyme itself, while imperatives such as “Let me hold it!” and “I traced it.

Hold it fast” speak to the poem’s failure to contain meaning. In the world of Two in the

Campagna, romantic and poetic desires to embody the infinite within the finite are always

thwarted, until the very pain of love and the very subject of the poem become these desires

and failed attempts to satisfy them.

And yet, considering the poem’s meditation on frustration within the conceptual framework

of a Lockean formulation of infinity deepens this interpretation to expose how Two in the

Campagna also rejoices in this eternal frustration as that which makes love and the infinite

possible. Just as counting allows us to believe in the infinite, so the finite self and the failure

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of the finite self to contain the beloved other create romantic desire, an infinite passion

defined by the failure of the finite ever to reach it. In other words, the essential frustration

of love makes love possible. Without the failure to count to infinity, we could never have

infinity; without the failure to fully identify with the beloved, and without the desire that

ensues from this failure, we could never have love. Thus, “Only I discern” indicates both

that the separate, singular self, and the eye of this self’s vision, is alone as it divides or notes

the division between “infinite passion” and the “pain” of “finite hearts,” and that the self

must be alone to behold these things. Only when singular, only when finite and thus

frustrated, can the I discern, or make out, the infinitude of love. The frustrations of love are

also its revelations. Two in the Campagna claims that our failure to objectify love—in our

relationships or in the amulet of a poem—is precisely our success at recognizing it. Thus,

the poem plays with Locke’s infinity as it develops an idiosyncratic sentimentality centered

on problems of number.

IV. Anti-Inf ini ty : Hume

Wordsworth’s claim, in the lyrical ballad The Tables Turned, that “Our meddling intellect/Mis-

shapes the beauteous forms of things;/—We murder to dissect” (ll. 26-8)86 is generally taken

as an antiscientific statement. In the 1963 article “Wordsworth, The Borderers, and

‘Intellectual Murder,’” Geoffrey Hartman claims:

When Wordsworth wrote “we murder to dissect,” he was stating a truth as

plainly as he could. The intellect is a passion that can lead to crime; especially to a crime against nature […] What Wordsworth does not disclose in the Romantic auguries is his still darker intuition that the mind of man may be generically linked to death. If the intellect murders, it is because it comes into being by a mutilation of original nature or of the natural self: its

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act reflects its origin. This darker intuition, founding the intellect—the growth of the mind—on death, is expressed with symbolic power in Wordsworth’s earliest poems.87

Thus, for Hartman, the poem’s claim is, on one level, a statement that intellectualism leads

to crimes against nature; on another level, it connects the machinations of the human mind

to the darker psychological impulses of human existence. More recent references to the

famous passage take Hartman’s reading as axiomatic.10 But what if we understood the

poem’s famous/infamous statement as an intellectual argument? Understanding The Tables

Turned as a refraction of one Enlightenment model of infinity—in this case, the anti-infinity

of David Hume—allows us to do just that.

Hume presents his disbelief in infinity, and in particular his rejection of the premise that

something can be broken down into an infinity of parts, in A Treatise of Human Nature.

There, Hume argues that the human mind is capable of perceiving natural minima, and that

thus there is “error” to the “common opinion, that the capacity of the mind is limited on

both sides, and that ‘tis impossible for the imagination to form an adequate idea, of what

goes beyond a certain degree of minuteness as well as of greatness.”88 Hume argues that

infinity is an unnecessary concept insofar as “[n]othing can be more minute, than some

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!10 For example, Paul Bové in his 2009 article “Philology and Poetry: The Case Against Descartes” refers to the analogical significance of Wordsworth’s claim, thus deducing the claim’s meaning as follows: “Ever since Wordsworth, of course, a simple cry has resonated among some poets, critics, and ordinary readers: ‘We murder to dissect.’ Neither Vico nor I wish to defend this too often sentimental and anti-intellectual gesture of affective ideology or common sense.” [Paul A. Bové, "Philology and Poetry: The Case Against Descartes," Law and Literature 21, no. 2 (Summer, 2009): 151.] Similarly, in a footnote to a 2003 article about Coleridge, Noel Jackson writes, “I refer in this sentence, of course, to Wordsworth’s famous comparison between analytical thinking and medical barbarism in ‘The Tables Turned[.]’” [Noel B. Jackson, "Critical Conditions: Coleridge, "Common Sense," and the Literature of Self-Experiment," ELH 70, no. 1 (Spring, 2003): 145.] The footnote explicates Jackson’s claim that this “metaphor that Wordsworth would later immortalize” is anticipated by Shaftesbury’s remark that “the activity of self-exploration is thus better likened to ‘the business of self-dissection.’” [Ibid., 127.] Even cited tangentially, the claim, in Wordsworth’s The Tables Turned, that “we murder to dissect” is thus understood as an “anti-intellectual” and “immortal” metaphor that one would, “of course,” recognize, whether one finds in it a basic truth or a touchstone articulation of a problematic attitude.

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ideas, which we form in the fancy; and images, which appear to the senses; since there are

ideas and images perfectly simple and indivisible.”89 Infinity, then, is a mistake of induction,

as “finding by reason, that there are other objects vastly more minute, we too hastily

conclude, that these are inferior to any idea of our imagination or impression of our

senses.”90 The concept of infinite divisibility, and thus of counting to infinity in either

direction, poses a challenge to Hume’s understanding of distinct ideas representing the

known world. Addressing the alleged fallacy of an infinity beyond the bounds of human

comprehension, Hume writes:

‘Tis universally allow’d, that the capacity of the mind is limited, and can never

attain a full and adequate conception of infinity: And tho’ it were not allow’d, ‘twou’d be sufficiently evident from the plainest observation and experience. ‘Tis also obvious, that whatever is capable of being divided in infinitum, must consist of an infinite number of parts, and that ‘tis impossible to set any bounds to the number of parts, without setting bounds at the same time to the division. It requires scarce any induction to conclude from hence, that the idea, which we form of any finite quality, is not infinitely divisible, but that by proper distinctions and separations we may run up this idea to inferior ones, which will be perfectly simple and indivisible. In rejecting the infinite capacity of the mind, we suppose it may arrive at an end in the division of its ideas; nor are there any possible means of evading the evidence of this conclusion.91

Thus, for Hume, the largest and the smallest things are no more or less knowable than

anything else. In anticipation and shadow form of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence (“To

see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm

of your hand/And Eternity in an hour” (ll. 1-4)92), Hume praises the simple, knowable

perfection of nature’s smallest forms:

When you tell me of the thousandth and ten thousandth part of a grain of

sand, I have a distinct idea of these numbers and of their different proportions; but the images, which I form in my mind to represent the things themselves, are nothing different from each other, nor inferior to that image,

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by which I represent the grain of sand itself, which is suppos’d so vastly to exceed them. What consists of parts is distinguishable into them, and what is distinguishable is separable. But whatever we may imagine of a thing, the idea of a grain of sand is not distinguishable, nor separable into twenty, much less into a thousand, ten thousand, or an infinite number of different ideas.

‘Tis the same case with the impressions of the senses as with the ideas of the

imagination [… ]93 Arguably, anti-infinity, or a denial of infinity, can be understood as another way of defining

what infinity means. Dale Jacquette observes that “[i]nfinity and infinite divisibility thus

provide a sharp focus for dispute about the metaphysics, epistemology and scientific

methodology of Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton versus Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.”94

While our analysis destabilizes a sharp distinction between those thinkers who challenge

infinity and those thinkers who rely on conceptualizations thereof, we may find it useful that

Jacquette has also noticed the centrality and plurality of formulations of infinity to

Enlightenment debates about the structures and details of the known.11

Whether we see Hume’s anti-infinity stance in terms of its continuities with or its departures

from other thinkers, we must see it as a contribution to a broad discourse about the nature

and reality of infinity. Thus, Hume’s definition of infinity as unnecessary and unknowable

represents one Enlightenment model of infinity. Notably, Jacquette explores the aesthetic

payoff of this model in terms of the sublime, arguing that “Hume’s aesthetics of the sublime

is not neatly packaged […] but must be extracted from his solutions to three problems about

the experience of distance in space and time, and the explanation of the pleasure that these

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11 Jacquette explores Hume’s denial that infinity is knowable or worthwhile, focusing on the ways in which Hume prioritizes “properly humanized empirical epistemology and theory of mind” [Ibid., 5.] over mathematical knowledge and ultimately “argues that we do not and cannot have an adequate idea of infinity or infinite divisibility in the first place, and that we can get along perfectly well without it, thereby avoiding the methodological confusions that the concept entails.” [Ibid., 5, xiii-xiv.]

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sensations afford, from the perspective of his early empiricist psychology of the passions.”95

Jacquette goes so far as to hypothesize that “because of its longstanding associations with

the concept of infinity, Hume may have preferred to downplay references to the sublime,

and substitute instead the philosophically more responsible and accurate though less

dramatic ideas of greatness and vast distance in height and depth.”96 Building on the

supposition that resisting infinity entails recategorizing the sublime, Jacquette ultimately

proposes that, for Hume, “in aesthetic judgment in general or aesthetic judgment of

greatness and the sublime in particular, the mind’s esteem and admiration for sublime

aesthetic qualities of nature and art primarily and essentially belong to reason and reflection

rather than exclusively to the passions.”97 According to Jacquette’s interpretation, Hume

denies infinity because it cannot be known; his formulation of the sublime thus centers on

questions of reason and reflection. According to Hume, aesthetic experience, unlike infinity,

can be mindful.12

Hume defines infinity as an impossible concept that contradicts a basic truth—that the

world is composed of non-divisible units that humans can both perceive and comprehend.

Put another way, the impossibility of infinity is the inverse of the innate truth that nothing

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!12 Pierre Bayle’s Zeno article from the Dictionnaire critique et historique is commonly taken as the object of Hume’s response in his treatment of continuity. J. M. M. H. Thijssen in the article David Hume and John Keill and the Structure of Continua surveys the literature on the subject in order to argue that “it is too limited to consider Hume’s exposition solely as a reaction to Bayle” and that Hume’s discussion of continuity responds to an older geometric tradition. [J. M. M. H. Thijssen, "David Hume and John Keill and the Structure of Continua," Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1992): 285.] In a similar vein, Jacquette argues that Hume’s position regarding infinity also responds to George Berkeley, stating that, like Hume, Berkeley “holds that only ideas of possibly existent objects can be conceived, and […] general ideas are ideas of things that cannot possibly exist.” (Jacquette, Critique, 29.) (Jacquette proves Berkeley’s adherence to the particular by analyzing various passages in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and in Berkeley’s private notebooks later published as Philosophical Commentaries.) Thus, we may understand Hume’s claim that “[n]othing can be more minute, than some ideas, which we form in the fancy; and images which appear to the senses; since there are ideas and images perfectly simple and indivisible” as, in the words of Thijssen, “Hume’s deliberations concerning continuity” which “are the result of his basic conviction that (our ideas of) space and time consist of mathematical/physical points.” (Thijssen, Hume, 286.)

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about the makeup of the world exceeds human comprehension. Taking Hume’s anti-infinity

stance as a literary-critical lens allows us to read Wordsworth’s The Tables Turned beyond its

potential anti-intellectualism to uncover a statement of the essential intellectual accessibility

of the world.

The poem’s subtitle, “An evening scene, on the same subject,” links it to the previous lyrical

ballad, Expostulation and Reply, in which “William” is questioned by “Matthew” regarding why

William sits alone on a stone, dreaming his time away, ignoring his books, and enjoying the

sweetness of life with no sense of purpose. William’s reply argues that he “[…] deem[s] that

there are powers,/‘Which of themselves our minds impress,/‘That we can feed this mind of

ours/‘In a wise passiveness.//‘Think you, mid all this mighty sum/‘Of things for ever

speaking,/‘That nothing of itself will come,/‘But we must still be seeking?” (ll. 20-8).98 Thus,

the reply to a charge of passivity/purposelessness is answered by a vindication of that very

mindset. According to William (both the poet’s name and a name composed of the “will”

and the statement “I am”), the powers of the universe will act upon our minds, whether or

not we seek enlightenment. The “wise passiveness” activated and articulated by sitting on a

stone and gazing out at the landscape is predicated on an understanding of the world as “this

mighty sum/‘Of things for ever speaking.” The world is a collection of speaking things, a

totality composed of communicative particulars, and a passive openness to the world is in

itself a kind of wisdom.

One might expect the next lyrical ballad, The Tables Turned, to be comprised of a counter-

claim, a defense of book learning and purposeful intellectualism. However, the poem is “on

the same subject” insofar as it defends a passive or receptive attitude towards the world.

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The “tables are turned” because the proponent of passive/receptive nature-watching

aggressively chides the “friend”: “clear your looks […] quit your books […] Come, hear the

woodland linnet” (ll. 1, 3, 10).99 When the poem declares that “on my life/There’s more of

wisdom in it [the music of the linnet]” (ll. 11-12), it not only uses an idiom to swear faithfully

but also implies that the wisdom in the birdsong is “on my life”—both on the subject of, or

relevant to, the life in question and imposed or impressed on that life. And yet, the bird that

affects and illuminates the poet’s life is not a nightingale, nothing distant or symbolic or

mournful, but only a simple finch, a small bird the twittering song of which is broken into

notes, or parts. After the song of the linnet, the poem introduces the friendly throstle, a bird

whose song repeats its melodic phrasings.13 The twittering linnet and chorusing throstle

syncopate the outside world and deliver the basic and repetitive units of their knowledge to

the passive recipient. In The Tables Turned, the wisdom and pleasure of birdsong is delivered

in pointillism.

In a similar vein, “Come forth into the light of things,/Let Nature be your teacher” (ll. 15-

16) suggests that to accept Nature as one’s teacher does not mean stepping into the light of a

transcendent or spiritual truth, but rather stepping “into the light of things.” By this

description, it is almost as if things themselves are illuminating or radiating meaning.

Without taking our reading that far, we can at least claim that, in The Tables Turned, the light

of the world belongs to the things around us. It is not the light itself, but the everyday

things illuminated, that the poem values. That nature “has a world of ready wealth” (l. 17),

then, may denote not only that the wealth of nature is easily accessible, but also that the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!13 Robert Browning, in Home Thoughts, from Abroad, emphasizes this repetition: “That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,/Lest you should think he never could recapture/The first fine careless rapture!” (ll. 14-16). [Browning, Poetry, 1125-6.]

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wealth of nature is in itself active or potentially active. Putting more pressure on the diction

here raises the question of whether the wealth of nature has its own capacities for knowledge

and communication. Thus, the poem conceptualizes the natural world as an independent

entity.

By this token, “spontaneous wisdom” denotes wisdom without any external, determining, or

transcendent cause. The natural world governs over itself. In a circular logic, “health”

“breathe[s]” “wisdom” and “chearfulness” “breathe[s]” “truth” (ll. 19-20). This implies,

both that wisdom and truth come out of health and chearfulness, and that health and

chearfulness sustain wisdom and truth. Thus, to be healthy and happy is to be enlightened

and wise because the elements of the world exist in a sort of closed system and depend on

one another in like manner. Within this system, “One impulse from a vernal wood/May

teach you more of man;/Of moral evil and of good,/Than all the sages can” (ll. 21-4).

In addition to understanding The Tables Turned as a poem that privileges the experiential

knowledge available in the living leaves of trees over the intellectual knowledge available in

the “barren leaves” (ll. 30) of books, it is thus possible to see The Tables Turned as a praise

poem directed at a self-contained universe that is made up of units of meaning and presided

over by nothing. Reading the poem in light of Hume’s rejection of infinity, the famous

chastisement that “Our meddling intellect/Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things;/—We

murder to dissect” (ll. 26-8) can be read as a statement against infinite divisibility insofar as

dissection beyond the “beauteous forms of things” murders these things, not only in an act

of symbolic violence, but also in an act of “mis-shaping,” of changing or denying the perfect

forms, or minima, that build up the world around us. Read this way, Wordsworth’s poetic

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conflation of the quotidian and the transcendent can be understood not only in relation to

David Hume’s definition of infinity but also in relation to Benedict de Spinoza’s claim that

“of things as they are in themselves, God is really the cause insofar as he consists of infinite

attributes.”100

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PART TWO: THE POETICS OF INFINITY

Interlude:

kimonos, wrap-arounds and diatr ibes

In her 1935 masterpiece of the everyday, Next Year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous, Lorine

Niedecker pens a brief breath of a poem on each page of a tear-off calendar. We may never

know whether she composed one tiny poem per month, or breathed the whole year into

being at once. But there the year is, each image and idea linked to the others in a diary of

thought, each poem surrounded by the names and numbers of days. Aside from their

textual context, the poems themselves all share an air of timelessness, of the transient or

ethereal. January 1935 reads "Wade all life/backward to its/source which/runs too

far/ahead.”101 Life moves in two directions, in this formulation. Many of the poems mark

time in this circular and circulating way, illuminating the forward progression of the calendar,

the flipping back through the calendar in order to read its observations, and the encircling

numbers:

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Fig. 2. Excerpt from Lorine Niedecker’s Next Year Or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous. Printed in Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 44. February 1935: If you circle/the habit of/your meaning,/it's fact and/no harm/done.102 April 1935: I can always/go back to/fertilization,/kimonos, wrap-/arounds and/diatribes.103 June 1935: The trouble/is: this stirs/a real mean-/ing./Humanity/is engaged—/on equal burial.104

In Next Year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous, the year is circular. The day is circular.

Consider the title: next year, a year to come, that exists wholly in the future and yet delimits

itself, that maps onto this year and thus allows us to imagine it, and that is, in this way,

circular. Similarly, I fly my rounds denotes both to fly to all the places one tends to fly (taking

the idiomatic definition of “my rounds”) and to fly in round shapes, in circles.

On a page marked January 1935, Niedecker writes: “The satisfactory/emphasis is

on/revolving./Don't send/steadily; after/you know me/I'll be no one.”105 In this short

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poem’s paradoxical consideration of what it means to be and to be known, one statement is

unequivocal: “The satisfactory/emphasis is on/revolving.” The most basic question of the

social—how to be and be with—is only satisfactory when one revolves. This method of

counting moments, which both self-consumes and self-propagates, renders the additive

process of the calendar a particularly resonant form.

We can apply a similar reading to the poem on the “August 1935” calendar page: “Good

deed, my/love. The ele-/ment of folk-/time. Nerves/are my past/monogamy,/said her

arms/going farther./Rock me out.”106 Here again, the overlay of different possible syntaxes

and an emphasis on recurrent time and the other help the reader to percieve the intimate,

revolving notion of counting at the heart of this collection. Rocking back and forth, the

poem aligns, through a line break, folk and time. “Nerves are my past/monogamy” and

“Nerves/are my past [.] monagamy/said her arms”—here intimate commitment both is, and

does away with, nerves. Being committed to another is also a commitment to time, since

folk is time. The regular, ticking rhythm of “Good deed, my/love” brings a sense of time

into the poem's first mention of intimacy, precipitating this thematic overlay. And the time

at stake is both and neither progressive and/nor cyclical, a rocking out, a regular motion

back and forth that somehow results in escape, be this an escape from nerves, or the past, or

monogamy, or time. Soothing in their multiplicity, the rocking arms are somehow also

“going farther.” Captured within the already-lost moment of the calendar page, this metered

repetition continually approaches something “out” and “far.”

Niedecker once wrote to Zukofsky that “The Brontës had their moors, I have my

marshes.”107 In counterpoint and contrast to Emily Brontë’s [I’m happiest when most away],

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Niedecker’s Next Year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestous introduces the second act of the project

at hand, not by destabilizing, but by re-stabilizing. Niedecker’s series of brief verses (if they

are verses, and not bits of prose the edges of which are delimited by the calendar’s layout)

here assert a refraction of Romantic understandings of infinity, enumeration, repetition, and

transcendence. They embody this literary-historical engagement within—and thereby

theorize—the calendar form. Encircled by numbers and counting towards new years, Next

Year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous encourages us to consider its precedents in theorizing the

quotidian and the transcendent properties of cyclical time. Likewise, Niedecker’s series may

ask whether all poetry counts.

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Chapter Three

The Poet i cs o f the Quotidian

I. A Theory o f the Part i cular

Dorothy Wordsworth’s poem Floating Island at Hawkshead, An Incident in the Schemes of Nature

has become something of an ecocritical darling. Generally construed as an informal

exercise in nature writing that anticipates some of today’s ecology awareness, the poem

presents a world separated from the greater world by water. Its creation via erosion is a

mystery—“Loosed from its hold -- how no one knew.”108 Such a world-in-miniature is, at

once, wild and domestic. Plants and insects live their lives upon it; though only the size of a

“tiny room,” the island is “a peopled world.” Separate from the water in which it floats, the

wild matter of the island functions as a room, a home, and a dwelling. And yet, adrift in

water, the island also represents a world that may upon some future viewing appear to have

“passed away.” What stands to pass away is both visionary and tangible, for the poem

claims that, even when the sight is lost, “the lost fragments shall remain/To fertilize some

other ground.” Thus, the image encodes a premature nostalgia. The vision will pass away,

into the lake; the island will pass out of perception. Perspective is here doubled, as the text

sees the isle from the shore, and from an imagined memory projected onto the lake from the

shore in the future. Along with the mystery of its origin, the island contains a vision of its

own loss.

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Attending to the poem’s emphasis on cycle and temporality,14 Kenneth Cervelli argues in

Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology that “Dorothy’s description of the entire cycle represents a

classic early manifestation of ecological thinking[,]” citing Kroeber’s understanding of an

ecosystem as involving a “constantly self-transforming continuity[.]”109 Such a critical

apparatus is very timely—so timely, in fact, that it obfuscates the poem’s actual philosophical

stakes. While I would not discount the resonance between Floating Island and a twenty-first -

century eco-focus, I argue that such an act of interdisciplinary thinking covers up the extent

to which the poem, in its various material contexts, already engages disparate discourses.

Dorothy Wordsworth’s poetry, which occurs in and as her daily writings, not only manifests

the traces of certain intellectual-historical discourses of the day but also intervenes in them.

In the case of Floating Island at Hawkshead, an Incident in the Schemes of Nature, the poem takes

up John Locke’s conceptual collusion of infinity and identity, and William Wordsworth’s

response to this theory. William Wordsworth’s response to Locke’s infinity therefore

provides the backdrop for an historical investigation, which is to say rereading, of the poem.

When read in its material contexts, first as one of a number of “Sick-bed consolations”

penned in Dorothy Wordsworth’s commonplace book, and then subsequently published

alongside and partially incorporated into a poem by Sara Hutchinson heavily edited by the

Wordsworths to read as a dramatic swansong, the poem shows itself to be a religious

allegory theorizing the afterlife in relation to natural patterns of daily change. The effusion

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!14 Viewing this emphasis as more symbolic than naturalist, Lilla Maria Crisafulli argues that “[h]ere the poet is celebrating the natural cycles that traditionally stand for the perpetual renewal of life, yet the fragility of this floating island seems to overshadow quite another fate, one marked by death rather than rebirth”; Crisafulli also cites Anne K. Mellor’s understanding of the poem as “a metaphor of a fleeting self[.]” [Lilla Maria Crisafulli, “Within or Without? Problems of Perspective in Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Dorothy Wordsworth,” in Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender, ed. Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Cecilia Pietropoli (Amsterdam New York: Rodopi, 2007), 59-60.]

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also emerges as Wordsworth’s response to her brother’s interpretation of Locke’s notion of

infinity. I shall not abandon ecocriticism just yet, however; rather, I will ask whether that

contemporary set of concerns can find traction in the poem when it is considered

historically.

We begin, then, with textual history, which is to say, by tracing the floating island through its

various permutations in Dorothy Wordsworth’s archive. Following Floating Island from

Wordsworth’s commonplace book to the poem’s publication illuminates the text’s

philosophical stakes and elucidates its relationship to practices of daily writing and to the

concept of the quotidian. Floating Island at Hawkshead, An Incident in the Schemes of Nature

appears in the commonplace book110 with that title and in print, in William Wordsworth’s

1842 Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years; Including The Borderers, A Tragedy. There it is titled

Floating Island, and this title is followed by a note that reads, “These lines are by the Author

of the Address to the Wind, &c. published heretofore along with my Poems. Those to a

Redbreast are by a deceased female Relative [this refers to the previous poem, by Sara

Hutchinson].”111

In the commonplace book, Floating Island at Hawkshead, An Incident in the Schemes of Nature

occurs two-thirds of the way down a page, separated by a row of dashes from the conclusion

of Lines Intended for Edith Southey’s Album, Composed in June 1832 in recollection of a request made by

her some years ago, & of my own promise till now unfulfilled.112 Lines Intended for Edith Southey’s Album

represents an extended meditation on what it means to face death, examining human

weakness and love of life in relation to the “unknown reward” of “eternal life.” The poem

concludes: “Then pray with me that in the hour/When here on earth [written above: below]

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I must no longer dwell,/Must part from Friends, & this fair world,/I may in calmness speak

the last farewell!]. Following such a prayer for peace and faith at the time of death, Floating

Island at Hawkshead presents An Incident in the Schemes of Nature in which fragments of a

departed world “fertilize some other ground,” in which the destruction of a finite world is

inevitable when understood in time. Indeed, occurring in the commonplace book just after a

long meditation on death, the text seems already to convey the idea of memory—read in this

light, the text remembers what it was like to anticipate a memory. Thus, in its local context

in the commonplace book, Floating Island at Hawkshead, An Incident in the Schemes of Nature may

be understood as answering the final lines intended for Edith Southey’s album insofar as the

poem presents a metaphor for life cycle and afterlife, community and inevitable

fragmentation. Such abstract themes, however, are treated as day-to-day changes. Thus, if

Floating Island at Hawkshead replies to the prayers in Lines Intended for Edith Southey’s Album, it

does so by invoking the daily changes in the landscape, the monthly or yearly changes in a

view.

In the left-hand margin of the second page containing Floating Island at Hawkshead, we find

the poem presented in hieroglyph:

Fig. 3. Manuscript page from Dorothy Wordsworth’s commonplace book, printed with permission of the Wordsworth Trust. DCMS 120.26.!

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!!Presumably a possible revision of the line “This little Island may survive[,]” the margin

contains the words “Perchance this little Isle may live[,]” crossed out with a particularly

wave-like swipe of ink. In Floating Island at Hawkshead, the island is afloat in a sea of that

which both sustains it and determines its eventual destruction. The notion that “Perchance

this little Isle may live” is negated, crossed out, by a wave of ink. Writing marks time, and

attending to the passing of days evokes those changes that time renders inevitable.

This hieroglyphic bit of rejected revision faces a stanza written in the opposite margin and

meant to be inserted into Lines Intended for Edith Southey’s Album: “We stifle memory’s

warning voice,/Heaven grant me power to hear it, + beware!/Would that I never might

forget/What now still prompts my daily prayer!/Then pray with me &c.” In the context of

the commonplace book, then, we can read Floating Island at Hawkshead as a reminder of that

which prompts daily prayer. Even though the world or home or community represented by

the island is ephemeral, there is other ground to fertilize.

Broadening our view of the poem within the commonplace book further supports this

reading, as the poems Lines intended for my Niece’s Album, To Dora Wordsworth (on an insert),

Lines intended for Edith Southey’s Album, Floating Island at Hawkshead, An Incident in the Schemes of

Nature, and Thoughts on my sick-bed seem to be entered into the commonplace book at once,

judging based on the consistency of handwriting and ink quality. Before this set of poems,

one finds a sort of title page inscribed: “Sick-bed Consolations_composed during the Spring

of the year 1832__[.]” Understanding Floating Island as one of a collection of “Sick-bed

Consolations” means recognizing the poem as occasional—the occasion being an act of

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consolation, or self-consolation. While the twenty-first-century reader may find comfort in

reading the poem as a statement of deep ecology, in its original context the poem functions

as a deeply religious allegory.

The pages immediately following Floating Island at Hawkshead, An Incident in the Schemes of

Nature in the commonplace book contain the poem Thoughts on my sick-bed,113 which in this

version concludes:

No prisoner in this lonely room, I saw the green Banks of the Wye, Recalling thy prophetic words, Bard, Brother, Friend from infancy! No need of motion, or of strength, Or even the breathing air: _I thought of Nature’s loveliest scenes; And with Memory I was there.

Read after, with, and against Floating Island at Hawkshead, these stanzas recast the memory of

a natural scene, not as that which will serve when time has passed for the scene, but as that

which will serve when time has passed for the perceiver. Whether the natural world is

viewed first-hand or recalled by word, thought, and poetry, it is memory that links dweller

and landscape.

Considered in the context of Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years, Wordsworth’s poem, here

entitled Floating Island, is loosed from the hold of the commonplace book, though not from

the hold of mortal and religious themes. This poem (here attributed to the less-gendered D.

W.) follows S. H.’s swansong, To A Redbreast — (In Sickness), which asks a redbreast to “my

requiem sing/nor fail to be the harbinger/Of everlasting Spring.” Additionally, the

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introduction to Floating Island retroactively introduces To A Redbreast — (In Sickness), thus

linking the two poems and asking the reader to remember the previous poem as prelude to

D.W.’s poem. Floating Island, then, opens with an invocation of memory, which may allow us

to read it, in this new context, as an elegy for S. H.

Indeed, Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years not only invokes the auto-elegiac tone of the

“deceased female Relative” in its introduction to Floating Island; the text also cultivates that

tone in S. H.’s poem itself. The proof copies of the book, corrected in Mary Wordsworth’s

hand, show the transmutation of the second stanza from:

And I not destined to enjoy The promise of thy song ; The thought shall not the charms destroy Which to thy strain belong. to:

Though I, alas! may ne’er enjoy The promise in thy song ; A charm, that thought can not destroy, Doth to thy strain belong.114

In the published version as opposed to the original proof, the emphatic italics and interjected

“alas!” highlighting the first-person pronoun dramatize the text and may highlight similar

themes in Floating Island. It is tempting, then, to read the brief poem by William Wordsworth

that follows Floating Island on the page of the printed text as a praise poem elevating these

two heavenly texts and claiming that they are too perfect to be compared:

The Crescent-moon, the Star of Love,

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Glories of evening, as ye there are seen With but a span of sky between -- Speak one of you, my doubts remove, Which is the attendant Page and which the Queen?

Floating Island at Hawkshead, An Incident in the Schemes of Nature and Floating Island both appear

in material-historical contexts that highlight the poem’s function as a religious allegory

expressing belief in the afterlife. When taken on its own, the poem tells a simple story: of a

small, inhabited bit of the world, at once domestic and wild, changing over time. Read in its

material-historical contexts, however, Floating Island demonstrates a religious and

philosophical theorization of what it means for a bit of land to crumble into water, of what it

means for the landscape to shift as the seasons change, of what it means to take a walk one

day and see things as they are.

To return to Locke and William Wordsworth, we see that such a theorization does not come

out of nowhere. Rather, it recasts and reshapes Wordsworth’s religious reworking of

Locke’s twinned understandings of infinity and identity. We recall how, applying Locke’s

inductive model to belief in the afterlife, William Wordsworth in Upon Epitaphs describes a

child who watches a stream flow continuously and comes to believe in the infinity of his soul

in the afterlife. In Upon Epitaphs, the observer of nature identifies with the infinitely flowing

stream, and realizes that his spirit is as infinite as the stream. Here the moment of

identification with nature is powerful, inductive, and inevitable—in short, it facilitates a

broad philosophical understanding of the interconnectedness of all things with each other

and with God. The spirit of the child is crafted in the same mould as the running stream,

and both must have infinite receptacles in the ocean or in the afterlife.

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Dorothy Wordsworth alters this formulation in Floating Island at Hawkshead, an Incident in the

Schemes of Nature. In the poem, the observer achieves the broad philosophical perspective

attributed to the child in Upon Epitaphs. However, this perspective is activated and gratified,

not via identification with the “great and sublime in nature[,]”115 but rather via identification

with nature’s humble, mortal forms. The poem’s grandiose opening stanza:

Harmonious Powers with Nature work On sky, earth, river, lake, and sea: Sunshine and storm, whirlwind and breeze All in one duteous task agree.

Slips into the small, the simple, the quotidian example: Once did I see a slip of earth, By throbbing waves long undermined, Loosed from its hold; —how no one knew But all might see it float, obedient to the wind.

When we read the poem as a religious allegory theorizing the afterlife, we see the mortal

being represented, not by the broad, mysterious lake or the stream flowing perpetually to the

river to the sea, but rather by a “slip of earth” that “float[s], obedient to the wind.” The

mortal being here does not see the infinity of personal identity by observing the infinity of

nature; by contrast, the mortal being recognizes her or his vulnerability and insignificance via

identification with the small, dissolving island, and even with the insects that live upon that

island, for whom the island represents the world entire. The limited scope of daily life

symbolized by the microcosmic interactions of the natural world becomes the key to

spiritual transcendence. The island-as-mortal moves, not towards an “infinite receptacle,”

but towards the promise that “the lost fragments shall remain,/To fertilize some other

ground.” The afterlife, then, is described not as the expansive and cohesive continuation of

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identity but rather as the promise that what little one has done or had will come to good.

Here we find a poetics of divine humility—rather than figuratively elevate the little island,

Wordsworth literally sinks the island in the lake. Consolation comes with the promise of

divine dissolution of selfhood. In this way, Wordsworth anticipates both Emily Brontë’s

poem in praise of “spirit wandering wide/through infinite immensity” ([I’m Happiest When

Most Away], ll. 7-8) and later modern experiments in search of poetic selflessness.

While this analysis may call to mind the tired critical formulation by which one compares the

works of William and Dorothy Wordsworth with the aim of upsetting canonical hierarchy,

this is not my goal. Indeed, I must resist the temptation to offer a bevy of examples from

William Wordsworth’s poetry that exemplify just the sort of humility and attention to detail

found in Floating Island. Rather, I offer the above comparison in order to show Dorothy and

William Wordsworth in conversation—with each other and with Locke. The conjunction of

material and intellectual history reveals the intellectual-historical intervention of Floating

Island as well as the extent to which the poem is “interdisciplinary”—engaging religious and

philosophical debates—even before any critical apparatus is imposed on it.

I return now to the ecocritical mode, for Floating Island has more to offer the ecocritic when

the poem is taken in its various historical contexts. While the poem may anticipate our

contemporary awareness of ecological patterns and environmental interconnectedness, the

poem’s “ecopoetic” intervention lies not in its portrayal of the grand scheme of things but

rather in its praise of self-identification with the fragile and vulnerable aspects of a landscape.

In Wordsworth’s poem, one praises the divine and thus consoles oneself; one does this by

empathizing with insects, with a clot of dirt, with the tufts of grass on an ephemeral island

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formation. The poem’s proto-ecological gesture thus lies in its assertion that empathy with

all life, and with the fragility of all life, is essential to one’s understanding of divinity and self-

identity. Dorothy Wordsworth’s intellectual-historical intervention is thus to ground Locke’s

description of the building up of identity within an understanding of natural breaking down.

If Floating Island helps us to be better environmentalists, it does so by reminding us to take

on the plight of each creature as if it were our own, because it is.15

I will conclude my reading of Floating Island with a few observations about a different poem

by Dorothy Wordsworth that treats many of the same themes. The untitled poem, which

begins [Dear Vale], appears only once in Wordsworth’s archive, in the back of a book

containing notes towards William Wordsworth’s Memoir of the Rev. Robert Walker. The

notebook, written primarily in Dorothy Wordsworth’s hand, contains notes about Walker,

transcriptions of graves in the churchyards of Ulpha, Ashdale, and other towns, and extracts

from the Register of Loewswater; these notes record a tour taken by Dorothy and William in

1804. However, since William would have dug out the notebook to write his memoir in

1820, by which time Dorothy’s poetic practice was active, that might be a better approximate

date for the poem. [Dear Vale] is written in Mary Wordsworth’s hand without attribution,

however the consistency of its form, themes, and tone with Dorothy Wordsworth’s poetry

suggest that it was transcribed, and indeed, very many of William and Dorothy’s poems were

transcribed by another member of the Wordsworth household. Since the poem is not in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!15 I argue that this is the most historically-grounded naturalist sensibility one can plausibly attribute to Dorothy Wordsworth’s poem while recognizing that the twenty-first century ecocritic might take issue with this form of ecology awareness insofar as it insists on anthropomorphizing the landscape and placing human consciousness at the center of all conceptualizations of nature. To this objection I answer that, if ecocriticism is to benefit from its engagement with literary history, it must aim to recover diverse models of nature intrinsic to literary writing rather than to retro-project its own idealizations. !

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print anywhere (to my knowledge, I am the first to have dug it out), I will reproduce it here

in its entirety:

Dear Vale when Spring thy charms unfold How pleasing tis to view Thy flowery meads and blooming groves Thy mountains[’] vernal hue Or when triumphant Summer comes How sweet it is to stray And hear thy happy nymphs and swains To labour tune their lay Or when ripe Autumn’s tawny vest Adorns each field and grove How charming mid thy plenteous stores With thankful heart to rove. But when stern Winter’s freezing breath Arrests thy howling rills How awful then it is to view Thy hoary mantled hills Thy rills proclaim our changeful state Like them is human life And as thy lakes, so is the grave Where ends our wordly [sic.]16 strife And as thy waters rest not there But seek the expanded sea Even so shall man’s existence flow To dread Eternity O, may it be my happy lot In Thee to end my days And undisturbed with joy to sing Our great creator[’]s praise _______

In this poem as in Floating Island, the observation of the natural world leads one to have faith

in the afterlife. As in Upon Epitaphs, waters “seeking the expanded sea” provide the viewer

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!16 The substitution of “wordly” for “worldly”—a substitution that could have occurred in Dorothy’s dictation, in Mary’s hearing, or in Mary’s transcription—creates an apposition between writerly attempt and worldly strife, between poetry and daily life.

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with an analogy—indeed, with a Lockean induction—on which to base this belief. However,

the poem focuses, not on the perpetual current of an individual stream, but rather on the

earth eroded by trickling rivulets. “Thy rills proclaim our changeful state/like them is

human life” thus suggests, as in the case of the floating island, that human life is an

ephemeral incident, analogous to runoff dividing into trickling streams over eroding earth.

As these waters seek the lake that symbolizes the grave and the sea that symbolizes “dread

Eternity,” they run together, the singularity of each rill dissolving like the ground into which

it carves its path. The island dissolving into the lake leaves a memory for the perceiver; the

rills write their stories on the earth even as they run together and dissolve into the schemes

of nature.

To read Floating Island and [Dear Vale] historically, we must take into account a peculiar

conjunction of material and intellectual history. In so doing, we not only recontextualize and

thereby decipher the religious and philosophical projects of these poems but also begin to

think through the Romantic archive as an intellectual-historical nexus. Just as the material

forms of the archive reveal the text’s intellectual intervention, so too does the intellectual-

historical context (in this case, William Wordsworth’s remaking of Locke’s formulation of

enumeration and infinity) facilitate a literary-critical approach to, for example, Dorothy

Wordsworth’s commonplace book—a text at once poetic and prosaic, quotidian and literary,

personal and communal. When we interpret such an artifact as a document of intellectual

history, we motivate the critical study of commonplace books and other nineteenth-century

forms of daily and/or women’s writing. In so doing, we can expand our definition of

Romantic poetry, not through recuperation, but by rethinking.

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II. Communal Genres

Dorothy Wordsworth is most famous for her journals, and critical investigations of her work

must and do address questions of everyday life. We can heighten our attention to these

concerns by taking into account nineteenth-century poetic formulations of infinity, including

Dorothy Wordsworth’s own. This context can help us think about how Wordsworth

elevates and in some cases theorizes the quotidian as a formal and philosophical concept.

Extrapolating from these connections, we can reconsider Wordsworth’s archive, an archive

within which poetic, aesthetic, and daily writings are often inseparable.

In Floating Island and [Dear Vale], Dorothy Wordsworth theorizes the quotidian as a

foundation for religious experience. Such a philosophical argument is of a piece with

Wordsworth’s practice of daily writing. Keeping in mind Locke’s theory of enumeration, we

can investigate how Dorothy Wordsworth’s practice of writing poetry in and as daily writing

accumulates responses, repetitions, and fragments, and how these ephemeral writings add up

to a textual embodiment, and indeed formation, of community.

Dorothy Wordsworth may not have written her own poems in her earlier journals; however,

her later writings, most notably her commonplace book, later journals, and albums, are the

main sources of her poetry. In Wordsworth’s journals of 1824-1835, for example, drafts and

bits of poems edge in on the space used for journaling, sometimes appearing in palimpsest

with journal entries. For example, as Levin notes, Wordsworth in her journal of February

12th, 1831 through September 7th, 1833 pens a journal over her poem Thoughts on my Sick Bed,

so that the poem, occurring under or covered up by, say, the phrase “short-lived attack of

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spasms in night,” takes on the status of diary and writing cure.116 In this same, hand-stitched

journal, we may find: a recipe for cough medicine; a penciled epitaph with monetary

accounts written over it in pen; two of Dorothy Wordsworth’s poems; two of William

Wordsworth’s poems; and a fair number of epitaphs including names, dates, and the

particular church-yard where they were found.117 Such shrapnel of texts encountered every

day accompanies the journal, and poetry in various forms makes up a large part of this daily

writing. In a similar collusion of genre, the notebook in which Wordsworth wrote her

journal of January 21st-August 9th, 1830 is sewn from rejected fair copy pages of one of her

travel narratives, and accountings crowd in on the journal from both sides, tracking

purchases of gingerbread and night caps, coach hires and lace.118 In the commonplace book

of 1820-1836, Wordsworth’s poetic writings occur, not only in fair and working copies, but

also as marginalia and response to transcribed or copied texts. Thus, in Wordsworth’s

oeuvre, poetic writing and daily writing are inseparable, as are poetic and daily texts. These

texts—daily and poetic, personal, communal, and interpersonal—enact Romantic sociality.

In her commonplace book, Dorothy Wordsworth conflates poetic and daily writings in a

communal textual space that both imitates and activates forms of community. Extrapolating

from the form and content of such a book, we may ask whether combining poetic and daily

writing develops an aesthetics, poetics, or elevation of the quotidian. These questions

resonate with some of the key concerns of Dorothy Wordsworth’s poetry. For example, in

Floating Island and in [Dear Vale], we find Wordsworth’s response to her brother’s remaking

of Locke’s definition of infinity. This intervention involves grounding spiritual experience in

moments of self-identification with the fragility of the natural world, and in the formation of

a schematic in which transcendent belief supervenes upon moments of humble interaction

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with the details of day-to-day life. In her travel writings, Dorothy Wordsworth makes a

parallel move, this time entering into the Romantic discourse on the sublime, a discourse

that grew out of Enlightenment debates about infinity.

Like her journals and her commonplace book, Wordsworth’s travel writings incorporate

descriptions of aesthetic experience into a record of daily life. Recognizing the repeating

patterns within which Wordsworth’s travel writings encode both her poetics of the quotidian

and her understanding of genre elucidates her intervention in Romantic period aesthetics.

When we read Wordsworth’s travel writings as generically, formally, and overtly aesthetic

expressions, we find daily interactions elevated to the realm of aesthetic experience;

moreover, we see the category of the quotidian come into play as a predictable aspect of

sublime experience.

In general, evocations of the sublime in Wordsworth’s travel writing follow a set pattern

within which the sublime experience resolves in a moment of communal, quotidian

interaction. In counterpoint to Kant’s Mathematical Sublime, the mind is recalled from the

fragmenting aesthetic experience, not by recognizing itself, but by recognizing others. Daily,

group activities and social interactions play a role in the aesthetic category insofar as they

represent a final stage of or resolution to sublime experience. In this way, daily and social

activities are raised to the level of the aesthetic, and the sublime is brought back down to

earth.

Examples of this “social sublime” occur throughout Wordsworth’s travel writings. Take the

following passage from Journal of a Tour on the Continent:119

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The road ascends directly from the bridge and is conducted along the range of hills bordering the river which flows below on our right hand. The town is seen to great advantage from the road; and the river’s banks all the way exhibit a succession of pleasant houses, gardens, woods, and vineyards. The first visible indication of our approach to the cataracts was the sublime tossing of vapour above them, at the termination of a curved reach of the river. Upon the woody hill, above that tossing vapour and foam, we saw the old chateau familiar to us in prints, though there represented in connexion with the Falls themselves, and by us now seen at the end of the rapid, yet majestic, sweep of the river; where the ever springing, tossing clouds are all that the eye beholds of the wonderful commotion. But an awful sound ascends from the concealed abyss: and it would almost seem like irreverent intrusion, if a stranger at his first approach to this spot, should not pause and listen before he pushes forward to seek the revealing of the mystery. Making a little descent we drove into the courtyard of the chateau, and thence walked to the summer-house, which looks down upon the cataracts. After the subsiding of our first astounding sensations, we talked with an old man and woman, who had followed us. They keep a tavern in part of the chateau […]120

In this representative example, the aesthetic experience resolves in social interaction. The

penultimate sentence in the above quote summarizes Wordsworth’s quotidian sublime:

“After the subsiding of our first astounding sensations, we talked with an old man and

woman, who had followed us.” The sublime experience ends in a social experience, and it is

unclear whether that social experience represents another stage of the aesthetic experience or

simply the conclusion of that experience. In this example, talking with the “old man and

woman” occurs after “our first astounding sensations[,]” which seems to imply that the

social counterpoint to sublime experience involves a second astounding sensation, its own

aesthetic value. Indeed, that Wordsworth’s descriptions of sublimity so often resolve in

daily/social interaction seems to suggest that these interactions are part of the aesthetic

experience.17

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!17 For an in-depth discussion of critical theorizations of the female sublime and potential points of relation to Dorothy Wordsworth’s writing, see Helen Boden’s 1998 article, “Matrilinear Journalising: Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth’s 1820 continental tours and the female sublime.” Rather than focus on how the sublime may be

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We may notice a similar conjunction of sublime experience with daily, social life in

Wordsworth’s description of the iconic Mont Blanc:

Oh! that I could describe,--nay, that I could *remember the sublime spectacle of the pinnacles and towers of Mont Blanc while we were travelling through the vale, long deserted of the sunshine that still lingered on those summits! A large body of moving clouds covered a portion of the side of the mountain. The pinnacles and towers above them seemed as if they stood in the sky;—of no soft aerial substance, but appearing, even at that great distance, as they really are, huge masses of solid stone, raised by Almighty Power, and never, but by the same Power, to be destroyed. The village of Chamouny is on the opposite (the north-western) side of the vale; in this part considerably widened. Having left the lanes and thickets, we slanted across a broad unfenced level, narrowing into a sort of village green, with its maypole, as in England, but of giant stature, a pine of the Alps. The collected village of Chamouny and large white Church appeared before us, above the river, on a gentle elevation of pasture ground, sloping from woody steeps behind. Our walk beside the suburban cottages was altogether new, and very interesting:—a busy scene of preparation from the night! Women driving home their goats and cows,—labourers returning with their tools,—sledges (an unusual sight in Alpine valleys) dragged by lusty men, the old looking on,—young women knitting; and ruddy children at play,—(a race how different from the languishing youth of the hot plains of the Valais!)—Cattle bells continually tinkling—no silence, no stillness here,—yet the bustle and the various sounds leading to thoughts of quiet, rest, and silence.121

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!remade or subverted in the writings of Dorothy Wordsworth, my argument here seeks to understand how Wordsworth’s travel writings engage with the various signposts of their genre, including dominant aesthetic categories, while at the same time theorizing the quotidian. Additionally, in her 1995 monograph Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818, Elizabeth Bohls points out the link between daily life and landscape aesthetics in Wordsworth’s travel writings. Bohls notes that “[l]ike the Grasmere Journals, Recollections [of a Tour Made in Scotland] insists that land is inhabited by people with practical needs, feelings, desires, subjectivities, and voices; both texts thus counteract to some extent the dehumanizing tendency of landscape aesthetics.” In the context of Bohls’ argument, the payoff of this observation is that “in Recollections, recurrent, oddly intrusive images and tropes trouble the balance that the Journals had painstakingly achieved. Travel forces Wordsworth to confront the mediatedness of the natural world with which she had lived in comfortable intimacy at home. Images from the city and its consumer culture, as well as recurrent allusions to the overseas Other of colonial exploration, manifest the intimate fragmentation of this female aesthetic subject.” I argue that Wordsworth’s formulaic inclusion of the social/human/quotidian realm in her travel writing marks her intervention in aesthetic discourse, whether or not this intervention is necessarily or meaningfully biographical or gendered. [Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 171.] !

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While in this passage Wordsworth claims that she struggles to “describe” or even

“remember” the sublime spectacle of Mont Blanc, this description slips easily into an

excitedly punctuated recounting of the village, in which the energy of the place has a self-

effacing quality, as “the bustle and the various sounds lead[…] to thoughts of quiet, rest, and

silence.” The sublime aspects of the natural world “appearing as they really are,” the daily

and social space of the village proves a no less effective, and perhaps more memorable,

aesthetic experience. Additionally, by evoking tranquility through its hustle and bustle, the

sensory experience of the village offers its own aesthetic effect.

In keeping with their genre, Dorothy Wordsworth’s travel writings contain descriptions of

sublime vistas and views, and of corresponding aesthetic experiences. (These descriptions of

the sublime experience may have been encouraged by William Wordsworth, as Dorothy

wrote to Catherine Clarkson of her brother’s request that she “amplify” her observations.122)

These descriptions tend to conclude with moments of daily social interaction, a pattern that

has the effect both of raising the quotidian to the aesthetic realm and of enfolding sublime

experience in the patterns of daily life. This pattern, the “social sublime,” also shows up at a

structural level when we take into account Journal of a Tour on the Continent as a made object.

Sewn and bound with commissioned illustrations and hand-written pages, Tour on the

Continent, neatly scripted, is a one-of-a-kind, created book. It is a tome of travel writing, at

once a homemade project and an imitation of a commodity.18 Thus the Journal of a Tour is

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!18 Pamela Woof accounts for the project of making the finished journals as follows: “By the end of August 1821, by working frequently, ‘very hard from ten o’clock in the morning till dinner time, at four,’ her Journal was finished, but still so roughly, Dorothy thought, ‘that I shall rewrite it in a plain hand.’ It was not until March 1822 that, in Dorothy’s view, it was really ready for readers, and then, she thought, owing to its length, it will be ‘dull reading.’ She asked [Henry] Crabb Robinson to procure prints, ‘a set of Swiss Costumes,’ clearly to enliven the further fair copy that she would go on to have made by ‘a young friend’ and bound in two

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both daily writing insofar as it represents an accounting of events penned into a personal

notebook, and a tome of Romantic travel literature, an interjection into a genre.

Furthermore, the second volume concludes with a table of contents buffered by two

examples of the genre, Extracts concerning the Pass of the Simplon from Brockeden’s Illustrations of the

Passes of the alps and Extracts from “The Alpenstock_or Sketches of Swiss Scenery and Manners by

Charles Joseph Latrobe.”123 These extracts may be said to act as statements of form, or genre,

here rendered social. On the one hand, such extracts provide a sort of genre standard or

statement of the genre towards which the book writes (both literally and figuratively); this act

of generic definition also renders Tour on the Continent dialectical insofar as it puts one act of

travel writing into conversation with another.124

Following these extracts, the volume concludes with two notes by Henry Crabb Robinson,

in his hand.125 Whether based in truth or novels in miniature, these notes, the latter dated

June 1833, attest to an extensive acquaintance with and/or information about various

characters met on the trip. The first note follows one Mr. Graham through crime and ruin,

including an act of swindling the travelers, to his eventual demise in a duel. The second

offers a more flattering portrait of three brothers, paying special attention to one who lost

his money without losing his character, and who Crabb Robinson claims to have visited in

Fiume in 1829. Whether these notes strike the reader as gossipy and far-fetched additions to

the travel narrative or as factual addendum, their effect on the form of the travel narrative is

to close with an invocation of social ties sustained over time, and of an aestheticizing (and

even novelistic) perspective on the details of those lives—known and unknown—that one

crosses when one travels and meets new people. Thus, Dorothy Wordsworth’s extended

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!handsome volumes in 1827.” [Pamela Woof, William, Mary and Dorothy: The Wordsworths’ Continental Tour of 1820 (Grasmere: The Wordsworth Trust, 2008), 3.]

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travel narrative—at once a journal and a book—concludes with claims about form and

claims about social connection.19

Taken as text and in material-historical context, Wordsworth’s Journal of a Tour on the Continent

reiterates and exemplifies her social sublime, the notion that daily, social interaction can act

as antidote, resolution, result, and opposite to—and powerful example of—aesthetic

experience. Wordsworth’s direct intervention in Romantic aesthetics mirrors her poetic

intervention in debates about infinity. The moment of quotidian empathy, in both

formulations, functions as both the lowest and the highest principle—an experience of

elevating the quotidian at which we can locate the key to religious or aesthetic experience. In

the material forms of Wordsworth’s poetic, daily and travel writings, we discover her

intellectual-historical interventions.

IV. The Grasmere Journals : A Counter -History

By way of a coda to this chapter, I will turn to the Grasmere Journals in order to elucidate the

extent to which these journals contain a nascent poetics insofar as they manipulate and

master the daily, or enumerated time, as a literary form.20 Pamela Woof has noted that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!19 Similarly, Catherine Clarkson’s fair copy of Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland concludes with Clarkson’s sentimental note about the process of transcription and then with fair copies, in Clarkson’s hand, of several of Wordsworth’s poems. In this case, the final, handwritten book copy of the travel narrative concludes with commentary about the making of the material object as a social act, in this case an act of friendship, and then moves seamlessly into poetic writing. 20 Opening the first volume of The Grasmere Journals immediately locates one’s reading in questions of daily life and enumerated time, as one finds a dairy that begins as and among literal accountings. Numbers and sums fill the inside cover and the margin above the first journal entry, and the accounting for days mimics and illuminates the numbers that surround it. For an admirably detailed accounting of the biographies of each of the four Grasmere journals, including historical and biographical contexts for the sums, lists, notes and sketches that dapple their inside covers, please see Pamela Woof’s thoroughly researched endnotes to her edited volume of The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals. [Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals including The Alfoxden Journal, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).] For now, we note

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Wordsworth “by no means always kept her Journal daily[,]” citing the following example of

“confusion” as just one small sign.126 The dates in question are July 29th and July 30th, 1800:

Fig. 4. Excerpt from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journals, printed with permission of the Wordsworth Trust. DCMS 20.

Tuesday still very hot. We gathered peas for dinner--the evening excessively beautiful..a rich reflection of the moon. The mournful clouds + the hills. + from the Rays of a huge rainbow pillar We sailed upon the lake till it was 10 o clock ---------------------------------- We walked up in the Evening to find out Hewetson’s cottage but it was too dark. I was sick & weary. ------------------------- Wednesday July 30th gathered peas for Mrs Simpson—John & I walked up with them—very hot—Wm had intended going to Keswick. I was obliged to lie down after dinner from excessive heat & headach The Evening &c see above

Here, the events of Wednesday are, at first, falsely attributed to Tuesday; the error is then

corrected. Beyond ensuring the accuracy of the record, there is a literary form at stake

here—that of the journal as a genre of organized daily life, of fossilized memory. Journal,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!that those texts that we compile under the title The Grasmere Journals represent a more formal or aesthetic definition of quotidian writing scripted alongside more mundane and fleeting acts of daily writing. [DCMS 20.] !

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then, refers not only to writing practice but also to literary genre. Viewed as a precursor to

Wordsworth’s later poetic experiments, The Grasmere Journals begin to take on a poetics of the

quotidian, to display a use of the form of daily writing to achieve certain literary effects.

“Rays of a huge rainbow pillar,” then, follow from darkness; it is not the other way around.

There is a formal aesthetics to the passage of the days.

Naturally, Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals occur among and in response to poetry. Lucy

Newlyn argues:

The material appearance of the notebooks, with Dorothy’s entries interleaving drafts of William’s poems, shows how her experiment in life-writing took place, literally, in and amongst his work, and how her identity as a writer was bound up in that of her brother. The journal celebrates their shared aesthetic and political credo. It can and should be read alongside the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 and 1800, as an expression of beliefs tested by empirical observation, and implemented in daily life.”127

The poetic phrase “interleaving” may make a bit of an overstatement—While William

Wordsworth’s words appear in all four of the journals, his handwriting appears in only three,

and in only one are his writings and the writings of Dorothy Wordsworth truly interspersed

(in the other two, W. Wordsworth’s writings more or less take up one or two small sections

of the notebook). Even so, the sharing of the notebooks and occasional “interleaving”

could be interpreted as a precursor to the development of Wordsworth’s own poems in, as,

among, and in response to daily writing and to the writing of those with whom she shared a

literal and a literary community. Newlyn’s argument that both The Grasmere Journals and

Lyrical Ballads represent “[t]he belief that living itself was a form of experiment, in which

personal and political commitments could be put into practice”128 suggests that The Grasmere

Journals participates in discussions about the relationship between literary language and daily

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life. Perhaps in response to such debates, The Grasmere Journals asserts a formal and aesthetic

fidelity to the rhythm and number of days.

Dorothy Wordsworth’s inclusion, in The Grasmere Journals, of moments of poetic beauty in a

day-by-day accounting represents the Journals’ poetics, a poetics that anticipates the sites,

spaces, and projects of Wordsworth’s later poetry and daily writing. To elevate poetic

moments out of their daily contexts is to subvert the whole of Wordsworth’s project. This is

only one of many reasons why it is so easy to find fault with one particularly scandalous act

of editorial carte blanche, that of Hyman Eigerman in his 1940 The Poetry of Dorothy

Wordsworth. There, Eigerman mines Wordsworth’s journals and travel writings for moments

of a certain modernist sensibility, which he then breaks into brief, Imagist lyrics. Describing

his method in the book’s preface, Eigerman writes that his process has involved “lifting out

of the context those passages of her journals which have seemed to me to rise into poetry,

preserving the words and the word order of the original, only marshaling them within the

free-verse form which was un-known to their author.”129 Much fault has been found with

such an act of appropriation, and I do not defend Eigerman’s editorial ethic; even so, we

may consider whether The Poetry of Dorothy Wordsworth might be read as an act of experimental

criticism. For example, one of Eigerman’s “poems” taken from The Grasmere Journals shows

us exactly what is not in the original, and this in turn highlights what is there. Here is

Eigerman’s poem eleven:

11 Grasmere very solemn In the last glimpse of twilight. It calls home the heart To quietness.130

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It is ironic that Eigerman finds peace within this moment in The Grasmere Journals, given the

sentence’s context in the original entry:

Friday Morning [16th]. Warm & mild after a fine night of rain. Transplanted radishes after breakfast. Walked to Mr Gells with the Books—gathered mosses & plants. The woods extremely beautiful with all autumnal variety & softness—I carried a basket for mosses, & gathered some wild plants—Oh! that we had a book of botany—all flowers now are gay & deliciously sweet. The primrose still pre-eminent among the later flowers of the spring. Foxgloves very tall—with their heads budding. I went forward round the lake at the foot of Loughrigg fell—I was much amused with the business of a pair of stone chats. Their restless voices as they skimmed along the water following each other their shadows under them, & their returning back to the stones on the shore, chirping with the same unwearied voice. Could not cross the water so I went round by the stepping stones. The morning clear but cloudy, that is the hills were not overhung by mists. After dinner Aggy weeded onions & carrots—I helped for a little—wrote to Mary Hutchinson—washed my head—worked. After tea went to Ambleside—a pleasant cool but not cold evening. Rydale was very beautiful with spear-shaped streaks of polished steel. No letters!—only one newspaper. I returned by Clappersgate. Grasmere was very solemn in the last glimpse of twilight it calls home the heart to quietness. I had been very melancholy in my walk back. I had many of my saddest thoughts & I could not keep the tears within me. But when I came to Grasmere I felt that it did me good. I finished my letter to MH.—ate hasty pudding, & went to bed. As I was going out in the morning I met a half crazy old man. He shewed me a pincushion, & begged a pin, afterwards a halfpenny. He began in a kind of indistinct voice in this manner ‘Matthew Jobson’s lost a cow. Tom Nichol has two good horses strained—Jim Jones’s cow’s brokken her horn, &c &c -- --’He went into Aggys & persuaded her to give him some whey & let him boil some porridge. She declares he ate two quarts.131

Understood in context, Wordsworth’s beautiful sentence, “Grasmere was very solemn in the

last glimpse of twilight it calls home the heart to quietness[,]” represents more than the

poetic subject perceiving the world. It represents precisely a poetics of the quotidian—both

a melancholy reaction, recorded as daily writing, to the absence of another form of daily

writing, a letter, and a moment of cheering up upon coming home and before finishing the

act of writing a letter. The heart called home to quietness, then, marks an aesthetics of the

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empty mailbox, of alterations, substitutions, and absences in daily life. “Quietness” means

both calming down and entering the quiet house. Here one of the most “poetic” passages in

The Grasmere Journals—and I mean “poetic” in a the high modernist sense of the word

implied by Eigerman in his selections—hinges on those aspects of the quotidian that root

and reappear in Wordsworth’s later poetry: daily writing (here, journal and letter); writing

promised to someone else; social interaction; and the conflation of the domestic space and

the natural world. Eigerman may not have meant his anthology as an ironic piece of

experimental criticism that exposes, by erasure, the poetics of the quotidian nascent in The

Grasmere Journals, but our own act of critical appropriation allows Eigerman’s text to do some

of this work. Eigerman shows us what poetry is not present in The Grasmere Journals, and

thereby shows us what poetry is. The Grasmere Journals encodes an emerging poetics of the

quotidian. We can understand those waves of ink that delimit and count each day to be

poetic lines.

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Chapter Four

Forms of Transcendence

Within a greater discussion of enumeration, number, and endlessness, we can sidestep the

definitional traps inherent to considering “lyrics” or “epics” and instead define a new

category of 19th- and 20th-century poems determined by their length. Considering the line-

by-line movement of poems that, by the very nature of their form, resist closure

demonstrates how dissecting the function of form can explicate a poem’s philosophical

intervention.

If the long poem articulates an abstraction, then it does so by a process of accretion, of

continuity. Wedding form and function, the readings that follow will consider what a long

poem has the capacity to index—emotionally, spiritually, aesthetically, ethically, socially—

and how, and why. For a diverse sampling of examples, I will explore the Hegelian synthetic

self produced by the closing couplets to each Spenserian stanza in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,

the meandering journey inward imitated by the blank verse of The Prelude, the pan-social

projective verse of Whitman’s Song of Myself, the short-line pause for breath that incubates

the iconic, excerpt-ready Imagist lyric all over Spring and All, and the formal inferno of

dividing lines in Spicer’s Dantean The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether. In addition to

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helping us understand these poems’ overall projects, the line activates these poems’ epic and

anti-epical potentials.

I. Journeys , Most ly Inward: Byron & Wordsworth

Byron’s great poem of the voyage out is also a formal assertion of self. The waves around

the vessel sound in two harmonizing rhythms: the lapping back and forth of the metered,

rhymed lines, and the larger ebb and flow of the alexandrines that conclude each numbered

stanza. It is not only the sea that swells in the rhythm of these lines, but also the ego, or,

more accurately, the formal act of self-assertion. Just as the poem’s overall story, and each

stanza, journey out, the cumulating lines pull back in to synthesize the inward and outward

and posit the self. Consider the following representative stanza:

158 Not by its fault—but thine: Our outward sense Is but of gradual rasp—and as it is That what we have of feeling most intense Outstrips our faint expression; even so this Outshining and o’erwhelming edifice Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great Defies at first our Nature’s littleness, Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate.132 (Canto IV) Here, we see the basic schematic of the soul or gaze journeying out and then flowing back as

the self synthesizes that which it has seen. In a formulation not unlike Kant’s mathematical

sublime, here the perceptive faculty is taken aback by the greatness of the natural world—

perhaps by the “o’erwhelming edifice” at which the self breaks off and the world begins—

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which seems to defy “our Nature’s littleness”; in other words, the greatness of nature

without indicates the smallness of nature within. This little Nature, the spirit, then grows, as

“we thus dilate/Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate.” The personal spirit

dilates—spreads out, spreads open—to provide a template suited to that which it

contemplates. The small spirit journeying into the broad unknown is synthesized, at the

point of the alexandrine, into a self the “size” of the world. The singular individual, or

multiple “we,” here expands to incorporate the “greatest of the great,” to match infinity,

perhaps. The caesura between “our spirits” and “that they contemplate” reifies the self-

other dynamic at the level of form. By contrast, the cumulative, punch line-like rhythm of

the alexandrine underscores the stanza’s conclusive act, though we may note that this act is

also inconclusive insofar as it represents not only a statement of selfhood but also an erasure

of the self as such.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, then, becomes a portrait not only of a journey out but also of a

cognitive project of marshalling perceptions into synthetic statements. Let us consider the

following stanzas, in which Byron/Childe Harold notes the ruins of antiquity, and then

moves on:

25 But my soul wanders; I demand it back To meditate amongst decay, and stand A ruin amidst ruins; there to track Fall’n states and buried greatness, o’er a land Which was the mightiest in its old command, And is the loveliest, and must ever be The master-mould of Nature’s heavenly hand, Wherein were cast the heroic and the free, The beautiful, the brave—the lords of earth and sea,

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26 The commonwealth of kings, the men of Rome! And even since, and now, fair Italy! Thou art the garden of the world, the home Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree; Even in thy desart, what is like to thee? Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy waste More rich than other climes’ fertility; Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin graced With an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced. (Canto IV) Building on and departing from the eighteenth-century idea of an elect poem-maker casting

a vast history (cf. Pope’s Essay on Man) and on the by-now-cliché Romantic aesthetics of the

ruin, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage transmutes objects and the epic histories they imply into an

artistic register as the poet-elect notes the ruins and moves on. Insofar as Childe Harold

floats by the ruins of Rome as a privileged perceiver, his take on them is reduced to the

affective and aesthetic; in other words, this represents a self-centered moment. Rome “was”

the “mightiest,” but now it “is” the “loveliest”—such a move unmakes epics, creating an

apposition between the strength of a nation and the pleasure of an individual aesthetic

experience. The closing line to stanza 25 reiterates this elision, as “The beautiful, the brave”

suggests, either that the ancient people Childe Harold images and imagines were beautiful

before brave—following the evaluative emphasis suggested by the order of these

adjectives—or that brave is another word for beautiful. Interestingly, the “men of Rome”

described in this puzzling manner are not actually named until the first line of stanza 26—as

the wave pulls back, and the poem once again journeys out. Yet, even as the poem returns

to its catalogue of things seen, Italy is described as the “fair” “garden of the world,” in which

“weeds,” “waste,” and “wreck” are “beautiful,” “rich,” and “a glory.” This evaluative

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portrait (landscape painting?) finds its fascinating, multifaceted conclusion with the

expression of “thy ruin graced/With an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced.”

It is the “charm” of the ruin, and not the ruin itself, that cannot be “defaced.” If we take the

word “charm” all the ways we can take it, a complex image of the poetic hero in the face of

Italy’s ruins emerges—he may be not only attracted to the ruins and influenced by their

apparent magic but also overcome by their power. Yet even as this seemingly affective term

may suggest that the ruins have a power over our hero, other denotations of the word

“charm” suggest that they will fortify or endow him. The image is an amulet, a pocket-book,

an experience that the perceiver can take with him—in other words, the scene has the

capacity to become text. And, in fact, herein lies another definition of “charm”: the

denotations of “incantation” or “birdsong.” So in their aesthetic appeal and influential

power, the ruins are aligned with notions of verbal art, whether purposeful or spontaneous.

Furthermore, that the “charm” of the ruins, unlike the ruins themselves, cannot be

“defaced” suggests, not only that this charm is eternal but also that it clings to a “face,” a

personified form of identity or identification.21 When the soul goes out to “stand/A ruin

amidst ruins,” it also brings the ruins back to stand a line among lines, a partial component

of an aesthetic, poetic experience. Even when the soul and the poem journey out, the poem

is always also a journey inward. The form of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage—more specifically, the

line, and even more specifically, the alexandrine at the end of each Spenserian stanza—

embodies this (poetically) productive tension and articulates the poem’s more abstract

process of bringing together observation and experience to posit and visit the self even as

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!21 Naturally, there is more to make of this line. For example, we might ask what the descriptive word “immaculate” means in each of these cases, focusing on to what extent the word is religious or spiritual (and, therefore, connotatively out of place), and to what extent it is an aesthetic comment about the purity of an image or experience.

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the poem purports to posit the world writ large. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage constructs a

transcendent selfhood that takes into account and artistically accounts for history. The

Spenserian stanza—a style of writing at once current and self-consciously archaic—is the

resonant and productive form of this selfhood.

Then again, the rhythmic gathering-in-and-moving-on suggested by the Spenserian stanza

becomes ironic by accretion. The ebb and flow, lapse and relapse, only happens locally—in

a wider frame, the sheer number of numbered stanzas following one after the other rides

against moments of lyrical self-perception. The pulling back in of each alexandrine becomes

just another litany, part of a larger pattern: epiphany, epiphany, epiphany, epiphany. In this

way, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage creates a space that isn’t epic—because its driving narrative is

more a chain of moments of self-recognition than a representative and represented story—

but that also isn’t what some might call “lyric” insofar as it cuts against the grain of those

moments of self-reflection and self reflected that the poem’s self-consciously vintage and

productive form strives to formulate. By virtue of its length, the poem transcends the

efforts of each stanza in a formal manifestation of the inherently impossible relationship

between individual and collective, self and world, Childe and Pilgrimage.

By formally imitating the impossibility of fully comprehending self, other, or the relationship

between, Byron’s great voyage out embarks on a project that it shares with Wordsworth’s

great voyage in. In Wordsworth’s depiction of the growth of a poet’s mind, the line also

functions as a formal apparatus key to the poem’s overall creative project; by “creative” I

mean both that the poem is a work of art and that it creates something, be it a “poet’s

mind,” a life story, a life, or an identity. In The Prelude, a flowing river of blank verse creates

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an especially vivid instance of Kant’s mathematical sublime in which the accumulation of

lines leads to a state that transcends the mechanics of the reading experience.22 While

following this analogy to its natural conclusion poses some interesting questions (do we

become self-aware, and if so, do we become aware of our own self, of the self The Prelude

journeys into, or of the implicated reader the poem builds into its project), what is most

striking is the extent to which pattern, repetition, and accumulation function to realize the

poem’s project. In this sense perhaps Wordsworth’s schematic is less evocative of Kant’s

mathematical sublime than Locke’s formulation of infinity. With its accumulation of line

upon line, The Prelude’s blank verse approximates a Lockean enumerative framework in

which repetition leads to a limited but real belief in selfhood and that which transcends it.

In order to think about the aims of The Prelude, let us consider its closing lines:

Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak By reason and by truth; what we have loved Others will love, and we may teach them how: Instruct them how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells, above this frame of things (Which, ‘mid all revolutions in the hopes And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged) In beauty exalted, as it is itself Of substance and of fabric more divine. (1805 ed., Book 13, ll. 442-452) What might it mean to “teach” “others” how to “love” something? Contrary to an

understanding of love as a naturalized, intangible emotion, The Prelude aims to teach love, or

promises that love can be taught. By this token, in addition to the meandering journey

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!22!This observation cannot have been mine originally. In any case, it relates to certain points made by Neil Hertz in the chapter “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime,” from The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime.!

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inward—to the detail-by-detail, memory-by-memory tracing of personal development

epitomized in the click and slide of blank verse—we can read The Prelude as an act of

teaching love. Through the sometimes tedious formal acts of attention that make up the

poem, the reader is led to obsess, to consider, and to try to understand the details of a

mind’s life story. Perhaps these seemingly endless acts of attention are in themselves a kind

of love, or a mechanism of love. And, we note, perhaps this kind of love is the best one can

do, something akin to “that best portion of a good man’s life,/His little, nameless,

unremembered acts,/Of kindness and of love” (Tintern Abbey, ll. 34-36).133 Transfiguring

these unremembered acts into (often tedious) lines and vice versa, the long poem teaches

love, thereby appropriating epic didacticism for intensely personal aims. As we journey

inward through the form of The Prelude, the poem guides us through acts of reading which,

like speech acts, do.

II. A Note on Whitman

The line is central to Whitman’s philosophical/social/national/erotic project—it is, in fact,

the clearest articulation of that project. Both this project and the line that identifies it are

epical in scope, making not only America but also a collectivity writ large. Within the long

line, within the human heart and mind, there is room for every creature. Furthermore, as

Song of Myself declares: “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look

through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,/You shall not look through

my eyes either, nor take things from me,/You shall listen to all sides and filter them for your

self” (sect. 2).134 In this ever-expanding epic collectivity, everyone is heroic.

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At one moment towards the beginning of Song of Myself, Whitman adapts his long-line

aesthetic to a theory of reading:

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much? Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? (sect. 2) In this brief excerpt, Song of Myself argues that getting at “the meaning of poems” comes

from reckoning grand spaces and practicing reading for “so long.” Getting at the meaning

of poems comes from spatial and temporal extension. In this theory of reading, reckoning

the earth can be compared to steady practice. Infinity, then—what one gets when one

reckons the earth—is comparable to, maybe even the same as, steady practice, repetition,

and enumeration. According to this excerpt, one gets at the abstract meaning of poems via

the infinity of practice. Every act of practicing reading is an act of repetition that is like an

act of expansion that will allow one to comprehend the infinite.

And yet, when Song of Myself asks, “Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning[,]” its tone

is at once seriously self-reflexive and in urgent mockery. While on one level this sarcastic

chastisement is a call to the reader to open the mind to the poem’s enlightening schemata, by

another reading we see that a sense of mockery is in keeping with the theory of reading here

presented. If the very act of reading—the repetition of it, the daily quality of it—is the

surest path to a poem’s message, then understanding a poem is nothing to be proud of. The

mechanism of the poem elucidates the poem. Every act of reading is an act of

interpretation, of demystification.

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Consider the following moment from Song of Myself, in which Whitman addresses questions

of number:

44 It is time to explain myself—let us stand up. What is known I strip away, I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown. The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate? We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them. Births have brought us richness and variety, And other births will bring us richness and variety. I do not call one greater and one smaller, That which fills its period and place is equal to any. Repetition leads to expansion, here, not only theoretically but also in the poem’s explicit

content. At the beginning of the section, an em dash creates a tangible apposition between

“myself” and “us,” the singular and the collective. In addition to the basic syntactic

meaning, that the explanation begins with a call to stand, we see here that when the wish to

explain “myself” is announced, the text typographically indicates that the collectivity, “us,”

then stands up. Or, perhaps then the collectivity can stand up; “let us” is interesting not

only as an idiomatic representation of how one directs a group to which one belongs but

also as a speech act in which permission is granted, in which “us” is “let,” permitted to pass,

or set free.

After the poem claims to “strip away” the known and “launch” every single being “into the

Unknown,” a resonant image of counting to infinity chimes in counterpoint: “The clock

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indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate?” In this way, the poem’s clear

statement of its project—its claim to explain itself—can be seen not only as the pan-social

standing up, stripping away of the known, and launching into the unknown that the poem

narrates, but also as the question of what the sum of all time—the sum of all clocks ticking

every moment—indicates. In the spirit of its theory of reading, Leaves of Grass explains itself

via the question of what eternity indexes, or the idea of what ultimate repetition opens up.

By this token, we may notice anew that the section begins: “It is time to explain myself[.]”

Flipping the syntax, we see that the algebra of this sentence also implies: “To explain myself

is time.” In this way, the poem—and the expansive personality constructed within the text

of the poem—equates itself with time, with the problem of the clock’s immediacy versus its

tenuous relationship to eternity and everything after. Song of Myself here recapitulates its

theory of reading and its overall project insofar as the poem, and “myself,” is at once the

clock ticking the moment and, by extension, part of eternity. Thus, after a meditation on

number, richness, and variety, Song of Myself concludes this meditation on “trillions” and

“trillions” by stating: “I do not call one greater and one smaller,/That which fills its period

and place is equal to any.” Equality, an integral part of the poem’s greater project, is here

defined in terms of discrete number. One is not greater or smaller as long as one fills up

period and place, or time and space—it is the sheer number of things, then, that makes them

equal. And so, as with counting to infinity, or, in a Lockean frame, counting to believe in

infinity or identity, in Song of Myself the spontaneous, spiritual, transcendent monism follows

from discrete “trillions” and “trillions,” from number leading to numberlessness, from the

immense value of filling up a bit of space or a moment of time or the span of a sentence.

Returning to formal considerations, perhaps we can ask whether the Whitmanic long line

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often gets too much credit. Sure, it reaches out and out to take in everything, but perhaps

sometimes, as in Song of Myself, it is the spillage of line upon line, the seeming trillions, the

encoded practice of reading, that lets us believe in the long line at all.

III. And All : Wil l iam Carlos Wil l iams

William Carlos Williams adapts Whitman’s philosophy in his early long poem Spring and All,

which takes the idea of the long line to the point of prose, or almost-prose. Alternating

blocks of barely-lineated writing with highly-lineated, thin columns of writing, Spring and All

questions the nature of poetry explicitly and formally. It also, purposefully or not, incubates

the Imagist lyric, as certain excerpts from this long poem have circulated and been

anthologized as key examples of this modernist form. Before these excerpts helped to

crystallize the Imagist lyric as a high modernist pocketbook genre, however, they appeared as

moments of brief, thing-y versification in Spring and All. In this context, they function less as

self-contained masterworks in miniature and more as Tennysonian “Break, break,

break[s]”135—as points of contrast next to which blocks of almost-unbroken text become,

not prose, but long-line poetry. In Spring and All, inconsistent line lengths become

definitional of a poem that wonders what poetry is, and what it isn’t.

Spring and All is also a long poem “addressed […] to the imagination[,]” in perhaps-worship

of, or at least insistence on, that “single force” which exists “[t]o refine, to clarify, to

intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live[.]”136 Living collectively in an eternal

moment guided only by the imagination sounds fairly Whitmanic. In Spring and All, Williams

writes:

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Whitman’s proposals are of the same piece with the modern trend toward imaginative understanding of life. The largeness which he interprets as his identity with the least and the greatest about him, his “democracy” represents the vigor of his imaginative life.137

In this passage, Williams both claims Whitman for his poetic project and distances this

project from Whitman. Whitman’s expansive, democratic identity is an example of those

things we understand when we understand the realness of the imagination, and yet it

represents the nature of “his” imaginative life. With this final turn of the screw, Williams

contradicts Whitman even as he praises him by making his project—at least in the syntax of

this text—representative of the individual, rather than the collective.

And yet, perhaps in Spring and All this one inherently represents the many:

In the imagination, we are from henceforth (so long as you read) locked

in a fraternal embrace, the classic caress of author and reader. We are one. Whenever I say, “I” I mean also, “you.” And so, together, as one, we shall begin.138

If author and reader are one, then perhaps we can read Williams’ mention of “his

imaginative life” as representative of Whitman, and Williams reading Whitman, and

ourselves reading Williams reading Whitman. By this extension, Williams promotes not only

Whitman’s imaginative democracy but also his theory of reading, as the vigor and vitality of

a text seems to ripple, by this formulation, through a chain of readers just by virtue of being

read.

Further incorporating Whitman’s agenda into Spring and All, Williams responds to

Whitman’s democratic notion of the equality of all things that take up time and space:

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We must acknowledge that the ocean we would drink is too vast—but at the same time we realize that extension in our case is not confined to the intestine only. The stomach is full, the ocean no fuller, both have the same quality of fullness. In that, then, one is equal to the other.139

Here, we see that Williams recapitulates Whitman’s belief in the poetics of equality, but to it

he adds the idea of consumption, of combination. Not only are we as great as the world by

virtue of being ourselves, we also recognize this equality via a process of wanting the world

to enter into us. Adopting Whitman’s idea of democracy, Williams adds the notion that

trying to take something in helps us to understand our equality with it. Permeation and

sharing become parts of collectivity in surplus of Whitman’s emphasis on countable

distinctness. Perhaps this passage calls to mind the child watching the stream in Upon

Epitaphs, or the perceiver viewing the island in Floating Island. Here, Romantic figurations of

perceiving the natural world are recast as literal consumption. In the above passage, one

understands the potential for self expansion, not via perception, but via consumption or the

desire for consumption.

Likewise, into his own prose-like take on Whitman’s long line Williams interjects slices of

highly-lineated text that resonate with, permeate, and complicate the blocks of text that

surround them. Take the following example, a self-reflexive meditation on the very notion

of a line:

From the petal’s edge a line starts that being of steel infinitely fine, infinitely rigid penetrates the Milky Way without contact—lifting from it—neither hanging nor pushing—

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The fragility of the flower unbruised penetrates spaces140 Here, the poem invokes and traces lines—which may or may not be poetic lines—starting

from the “petal’s edge,” from, not just the thing, but the line where the thing ends and the

world begins. “That,” which could refer either to the line in question, or to the petal’s edge

or moment of interface with the world, is of steel both “infinitely fine” and “infinitely rigid.”

In other words, it is infinitely thin (and, by denotation, defined) and strong or unbending.

This hardy minutia “penetrates” the universe, while at the same time it may borrow from

this universe if we note the steel/steal pun. The line, then—small, strong, and perhaps

stolen or even stealing away—enters the greater world. And yet, it does not touch down:

there is no “contact.” It is the “fragility of the flower,” its infinite fineness, that “penetrates

spaces.”

In this way, Williams adds a short-line democracy to his appropriation of Whitman’s ethical

aesthetic. It is the delicacy and strength of the short-line sliver of poetry—what happens in

those passages that are so often turned into the Imagist lyric, i.e. those passages that begin at

the edge of the object—that can permeate the universe without effect, without “contact.”

The long line is all-inclusive; the short line is painlessly included. The long line is monist; the

short line is a point of departure and entry. Alternating the two in the service of a long

poem, Williams alternates between sameness and difference, between all-encompassing

imagination and the slick but firm borders between things, between the infinite and the

countable.

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Since so much of the work of the line happens by point of contrast, we can understand

some of what is undone when these thin arrows of text are removed from the thick, long-

line universe they inhabit and permeate and are made to stand alone as generic

representations. The Red Wheelbarrow, we must remember, is not a red wheelbarrow in the

middle of nowhere. Adding to our discussion of the ways in which Imagist excerpting of

Spring and All disrupts the contrast in line structures that does so much work to articulate

some of the poem’s key concerns, Easterbrook’s critique of the history of excerpting The Red

Wheelbarrow points to a power structure that this excerpting imposes.23 When excerpts from

Spring and All become high modernist, Imagist lyrics, they come with a critical or interpretive

key rather than themselves serving as “fine” and “rigid” keys with which to unlock the

stuffy, long-line blocks of text around them. And, since in the schematic of Spring and All

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!23 In his 1994 article “Somehow disturbed at the core”: Words and Things in William Carlos Williams, Neil Easterbrook explores what is created, and what erased, when this specific excerpt from Spring and All appears as an iconic Imagist lyric in anthologies and in the classroom. Speaking of the title, Easterbrook argues: For example, changing the title from “XXII” to “The Red Wheelbarrow” gives the text a

specific, specifically different frame. As “The Red Wheelbarrow,” even the text's fragmented compound noun is fused into some different thing: literally, its syncretic counterpart becomes a minimalistic poem about a particular object, and figurally, it becomes a gloss on the perceptual horizon, a synecdoche for the pre-problematized experience Husserl called the “natural attitude” and Heidegger the “pre-original” or “pre-understanding.”

In Easterbrook’s text, this statement follows a discussion of how The Red Wheelbarrow is glossed in notable examples of twentieth-century anthologies, as well as what kind of poetic movements this phenomenon creates (a mimetic Objectivism, for example). Easterbrook goes on to discuss the ways in which considering the excerpt in its original context produces meaning, paying attention to how Part XXII is followed by a discussion of the differences between poetry and prose. Easterbrook argues that:

[T]he poem ‘so much depends’ conforms more to the rubric usually given for prose (discursiveness, clarity of statement, syntactical continuity) while the excessively rhetorical prose strikes images and figures non-discursively, paratactically, as in surrealist or postmodern poetry […] editors perform a disservice, for it is one thing to present a poem without compounding confusion, but quite another to edit away its inherent—indeed, intended—problematics.” [Neil Easterbrook, "Somehow Disturbed at the Core": Words and Things in William Carlos Williams,” South Central Review, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994): 28-9.]

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the implied writer encodes the reader in every act of self-mention, perhaps we can say that,

within the di-verse space of Spring and All, the key is in the hand of every reader. To break

the poem apart is to divest it of its power to self-actualize over the course of the reading

process, to murder to dissect. Thus, understanding the power of the poem—or the power

of any part of it—means taking into account the ways in which different types of lineation

contrast and create each other.

IV. Sending the Line to Hel l : Spicer

As a final example, I will consider Berkeley Renaissance poet Jack Spicer’s maddeningly

interpretive Dante intertext, The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether. In this long poem,

Spicer employs a sort of Whitmanic democracy when it comes to types of language. The

Heads of the Town Up to the Aether uses language from disparate realms of social life and

forces these modes of address into conversation with one another. Allusions to canonical

poetry answer nonsense syllables. Sexual innuendos cut off baby talk. A grammar-lesson

list of pronouns responds to metaphysical musings about the afterlife. In this way, Spicer

creates a space in which every, and thereby no, speech genre applies (to borrow Bakhtin’s

term).141 He also creates a space in which distinct and seemingly unrelated acts or types of

speech allow one another to exist, by providing responses, and thereby endpoints and

unity, to the communicative acts that come before them. These conflations and relations

are how, in the vertically constructed hell section and fake-novel purgatory section of this

Dante intertext, Spicer constructs an exploding inferno of words. The poem then rebuilds

language with immense delicacy, with an eye always on its constructed nature, in order to

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craft a space for poetic dwelling (channeling Heidegger).142 This is the poem’s paradise, A

Textbook of Poetry.

The line’s24 participation in this project of tearing down and rebuilding language is

profound. In the hell section, Homage to Creeley/Explanatory Notes, the poetic line is

materialized as a thick horizontal line that divides each page in two so that the “explanatory

notes” occur physically under segments of poetic writing, the “homage to Creeley.” By

contrast, the purgatorial section of the poem, entitled A Fake Novel about the Life of Arthur

Rimbaud, moves in brief chapters that are often broken into prose paragraphs. (At one

point, the text refers to itself as “this unattractive prose[.]”143) Finally, the paradisal city of

language, A Textbook of Poetry, consists of twenty-eight numbered sections, which for the

most part consist of clusters of brief, elegant paragraphs in which very short sentences—

often sentence fragments—evoke the poetic line included in a collectivity. Claiming that

“Where we are is in a sentence” and that “a city is a collection of humans[,]” A Textbook of

Poetry folds sentences such as “Being faithful to it.”144 into full yet brief paragraphs of text.!

The contrasting geometries produced by the line in The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether

affect the directionality of the poem, as described by Ross Feld:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!24 The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether complicates readerly assumptions about what the line is, and where the line breaks. Although A Fake Novel About The Life of Arthur Rimbaud, A Textbook of Poetry, and the Explanatory Notes of the hell section often seem to progress paragraph by paragraph, when I reproduce sections of the poem here I make sure to follow the original line breaks within the paragraphs. As this long poem was originally produced and circulated in mimeograph, i.e. in small quantities and for a specific audience, it makes sense to take the typographical layout as more or less “set.” Thus, we may consider paragraphs of text to be vertically lineated if we so choose. Additionally, much like the alternating verse styles in Spring and All, The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, with its diversity of forms, raises questions about what the line is, and where the line ends. I will argue, for example, that the tight paragraphs built of fragmentary sentences in A Textbook of Poetry perform acts of collecting poetic lines into compact spaces. This argument, much like that section of the poem, relies on a stereotypical “lyric line” of poetry that is then subverted, reformed, and remade.

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Though it’s perhaps the most singular investigation of surrealistic disexpectation ever written by an American, the initial layer of compositional terms is strictly Dante's: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Yet each of the three books making up the larger volume is situated upon a different directional axis as well. Homage to Creeley, with its Orpheus/Eurydice/Cocteau basis, is vertical—‘Hell is where we place ourselves when we wish to look upward.’ A Fake Novel about the Life of Arthur Rimbaud is very much horizontal: ‘Sentiment is not to the point. A dead letter is there because it has no longer real addresses.’ And A Textbook of Poetry literally is crucial: both vertical and horizontal...and therefore circumferential: ‘a fire that was neither a glow or direction. But the business of it was fire.’145

Feld’s use of the term “axis,” here, highlights the extent to which the poem’s movement is

linear. In Homage to Creeley/Explanatory Notes, the verticality of the linguistic inferno relies

on a horizontal line, perhaps the idea of the poetic line made manifest. This physical

barrier between different parts of the poem emphasizes the poem’s claim that “Sheer

hell/Is where your apartness is your apartness[.]”146 In stark contrast to the paradisal

community, or city, that the poem ultimately builds or rebuilds, in hell every page has a

wall.

Let us consider the following page of hell in order both to understand how the physical

line between sections functions and how it relates to other forms or questions of lineation.

This particular section also treats enumeration and number explicitly.

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Magic Strange, I had words for dinner Stranger, I had words for dinner Stranger, strange, do you believe me? Honestly, I had your heart for supper Honesty has had your heart for supper Honesty honestly are your pain. I burned the bones of it And the letters of it And the numbers of it That go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 And so far. Stranger, I had bones for dinner Stranger, I had bones for dinner Stranger, stranger, strange, did you believe me? _______________________________________________________ Orpheus was never really threatened by the Underworld during his visits there. In this poem they present him with a diplomatic note. Honesty does not occur again in the poem. The numbers do.147

As is often the case in Homage to Creeley/Explanatory Notes, the top half of the page is highly

lineated while the bottom half loosely conforms to prose syntax and paragraphs. On this

page in particular, the “poem” at the top utilizes repetition and wordplay to estrange the

stranger—in other words, to insist on the fact of the stranger. This being a linguistic hell of

apartness, “bones,” “letters,” and “numbers” are “burned” while the poem demands of the

stranger (and perhaps the strange reader): “do you believe me?” “did you believe me?” This

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moment of failed communication and self-complicated integrity (“Honesty honestly are your

pain”) breaks off at the point of the horizontal line. Instead of the stranger’s reply, the

poem runs up against the line made manifest. What follows, then, is criticism of the poem

as such and not a reply to its protestations and prostrations. Occurring after not only the

horizontal line but also a significant space of blankness, this criticism contextualizes the

above text within the un-narrative of the poem’s underworld by re-labeling it as, not

“Magic,” but rather a “diplomatic note” presented to Orpheus by the underworld. The gloss

separates itself from what happens before the line.

Interestingly, this phrase, “before the line,” implies that what happens on the page above the

line is pre-poetic. This is strange, as the top half of the page is the self-consciously poetic

half, complete with title and overt lineation. Perhaps one possibility for understanding the

role of the line in Spicer’s linguistic hell is as follows: the poem becomes a poem as such

when it is delineated, distanced, and criticized. The practice of considering poetry qua

poetry makes the reader a stranger. The critical apparatus activates separation. As in

Easterbrook’s argument about A Red Wheelbarrow, hermetically sealing a poem imposes a

power structure that may be detrimental or even painful; this struggle occurs not only

between student and teacher, but also between reader and text. Seeing the poem as a

poem—after the line—makes us a stranger to it, makes it beg us to believe it.

The bottom of the page insists that we don’t believe it, stating that “Honesty does not occur

again in the poem.” Is this an ironic statement about a word variations of which occur four

times, or is it an insistence on the ruthlessness of the poem? In a similarly complicating

move, the statement that, by contrast, “The numbers do” could refer to the act of specifying

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the numbers, which is in some sense an act of repetition (“And the numbers of it/That go

1,2,3,4,5,6,7”). This statement could also refer to the act of mentioning “the numbers,” or it

could be a false or ironic statement, as these numbers do not reoccur. Either way, this is a

statement about distinction. The enumeration that naturally flows towards infinity in

Whitman and Williams here reinforces distinction. These lineated and delineated poems, in

which numbers occur and recur again, are exactly what need to be taken apart in order for a

communal linguistic space to be built.25

Chapter IX of the purgatory section, A Fake Novel about the Life of Arthur Rimbaud,

represents the first use of short lines (or, a column of broken lines in place of brief

paragraphs) in that section. Chapter IX follows a somewhat-nonsensical “chapter” that is

full of numbers (two illustrative examples: “Rimbaud is now fifteen and is shooting horses.

Since he is now dead, the years 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 are unimportant both to his

death and to our lives” and “Imagine not being attacked by Indians

(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14)”148).26 Chapter IX, subtitled “The Poem Rimbaud Wrote

On October 20, 1869,”27 proceeds as follows:

I do not proclaim a new age. That I am fifteen God only knows. I keep the numbers in my head When I am dead I will fall into a rage

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!25 Throughout The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, Spicer employs numbers as part of the lyric ideal that he de- and reconstructs. Whether these numbers invoke questions of form, aspects of modernist experiments, or a longer tradition of poetry in conversation with mathematics, we can only speculate. That said, in the above example, the notion that “[t]he numbers do [occur again in the poem]” could suggest, both that counting is integral to poetic practice, and that the numbers are part of some other aspect of the poem, on the level of the word, sentence, or line. 26 Here again, we see Spicer’s inclusion of numbers, which in this instance represent both the passage of time (the years passing in the poetic imitation of a novel) and the capacities and limits of imagination (perhaps a response or rebuttel to such modernist tracts as Spring and All). 27 This was the date of Rimbaud’s fifteenth birthday.

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And bite off all my toes. When I am twenty I will see Eternity And all those old numbers And be their anger When I am dead I will leave the stage And bite off all my toes.149

Here, number is at once holy and private. Numbers marking age are associated with the

divine—“God only knows” that Rimbaud is fifteen, and when he is twenty he “will

see/Eternity”—while “the numbers” in general are more private. Rimbaud “keep[s] the

numbers in [his] head” and will see “all those old numbers” when he sees eternity. Thus,

we see a sort of numerical purgatory. As opposed to hell, in which numbers only denote

separation and failed connection, here numbers are markers of isolation (“I keep the

numbers in my head”) but also the promise, and perhaps hope, of an enigmatic future: “I

will see/Eternity/And all those old numbers/And be their anger.” This being purgatory,

the notion of being the number’s anger is both painful and validating—being something to

the numbers begins to suggest a sense of relation, an act of “seeing” something as external

that was once only internal and then existing in relation to that other. And yet, since those

numbers are or begin within the head, this “other” may be anything but—the poem may

count on its toes.

As mentioned above, at this point in the poem’s linguistic purgatory, frequent lineation

reappears. The chapter is subtitled “The Poem Rimbaud Wrote,” a striking generic

definition in a section of a long poem that calls itself a “Novel” and proceeds by chapters

and paragraphs. Relating to our discussion of number above, we may note that the

inclusion of a specific date in the title creates an apposition between the poem and

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numbers, which here become almost material if we apply a little exegetical pressure:

Rimbaud wrote the poem on the date, and the date as a birthday symbolizes and embodies

the birth of the poet. Whether I am making too much of the title or no, one thing is

certain—to reintroduce line breaks is to reintroduce number to the space of the text. In

this way, the poem’s careful assessment of possible connections may be self-referential;

perhaps the numbers in the head are the numbered lines of the poem. The passing

numbers implied by time and age, then, also involve the passing of the poem. Thus,

eventually seeing eternity involves a process of considering the text’s separateness and

togetherness. In a tortured, ambiguous, purgatorial, anti-Whitmanic/anti-epic (and in fact

novelistic) way, here too acts of enumeration lead to infinity.

An interruption in the heaven section of the poem, A Textbook of Poetry, reopens this

discussion of the line’s potential. This section of the poem unfolds over the course of

numbered clusters of paragraphs that fold the fragmented poetic line into their image of

resonant linguistic community. Here is a representative section:

8. Descends to the real. By a rope ladder. The soul also goes there. Solely—not love, beyond the thought of God. I mean the thought of thinking about God. Naturally. I mean the real God. Disregards all other images as you disregard the parts of words in a poem. The Logos, crying to be healed from his godhead. His dismay. Disappears within the flatiron of existence. That smoothes out all the words in the poem. Imparts them. Makes them real like the next day. And as the words heal, I did not mean the real God.150

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This particular section represents a heavenly questioning of reality. The insistent, empty

claims to honesty that we saw in the “Magic” section of Homage to Creeley/Explanatory Notes

are here recast as dynamic acts of self- and other-aware meaning. “I mean the thought of

thinking about God […] I mean the real God […] And as the words heal, I did not mean the

real God.” In this shifting register, the confused, compounding act of thinking about God

shifts from meaning the real God to not meaning the real God. In other words, as the

words heal (do they heal the poem, as language is rebuilt and restored? do they heal

themselves?), the possibility of a real God emerges. Because of this possibility, the real God

and the self-absorbed act of thinking about thinking about God are no longer one and the

same thing. The poem creates a space for shifting meanings, a space in which something

“descends to the real,” in which the words in the poem are “smoothed out.” In terms of the

line, the folding of sentences and phrases into aesthetically appealing packets of observations

and statements does just that—smoothes out the words in the poem, creates a space for

slippery meaning and facile movement.

There is one exception, and this is section 17, which not only reintroduces lineation and

short lines to the poem but also highlights these lines with dashes. The section questions

both conceptions of lyric poetry and arguments against their tenants:

17 —A human love object is untrue. Screw you. —A divine love object is unfair Define the air It walks in.

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The old human argument goes on with the rhymes to show that it still goes on. A stiffening in time as puns are a stiffening in meaning. The old human argument that goes ahead with our clothes off or our clothes on. Even when we are talking of ghosts. —A human love object is untrue Screw you —A divine love object is unfair Define the air It walks in. Imagine this as lyric poetry.151

This section seems to make two competing historical arguments. If we take each dash as

defining a cohesive speech act, then the poem works against notions of a divine or human

love object. However, if we take each dash to represent a moment of dialogue, then the

poem rebukes these very claims, first with aggression, and then with an ambiguous

interrogation that somehow seems to be a statement of belief insofar as it implies that

something exists that walks on air. Claiming and declaiming love, the section states that this

argument “goes on with the rhymes to show/that it still goes on. A stiffening in time as

puns are a stiffening/in meaning.” The rhymes and puns of arguments about love—a.k.a.

love poetry—go on to show that they go on. Love poetry is an ontological proof of itself,

“[e]ven when we are talking of ghosts[,]” whether the subject/object is dressed or no, no

matter the form of the poem or how it pertains to the extra-poetic. When the section

concludes, “Imagine this as lyric poetry[,]” it both asks us to reconsider our sense of what

poetry is for (where “this” refers to section 17) and poses the question of whether A

Textbook of Poetry, with its utter inclusivity of language and meaning, might be a new, a fitting,

an unexpected, or even a more effective way to approach some of the love-object-oriented

concerns of “lyric poetry.” In this way, an anomaly of lineation introduces a meditation on

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the lyric into the last book of an epic intertext. In addition to providing a self-reflexive

critique of the work of this long poem, the dramatized lineation of section 17 highlights by

contrast the formal congruency of a linguistic heaven in which incongruent elements are

combined.

In The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, lineation is a symbol of delineation, of difference.

Looking at patterns and changes in the line over the course of this three-section long poem

can help us to understand how Spicer exaggerates and thereby deconstructs this sharp

distance—and the isolation it implies—with the ultimate aim of creating a linguistic space in

which “From the top to bottom there is a universe. Extended past/what the words mean

and below, God damn it, what the words/are. A vessel, a vesicle of truth.”152

Circumventing the breaks of vertical poetry and poetic criticism (as in Homage to

Creeley/Explanatory Notes) and the uneasy movement of a “Fake Novel,” Spicer’s linguistic

paradise brings poetic lines together in a space of candid, shifting meaning.

V. Ghosts o f Departed Quanti t i es

It is at the level of the line, and in the flow of line upon line, that this sampling of long

poems works out notions of epicality, postulations of self and other, and poetic processes

of making meaning, knowledge, and belief. Just as the lines are in the poem, so too is the

poem in the lines. Examining the role of the line in the long poem allows us to theorize the

extent to which acts of counting may contain infinity and to which the long poem

functions as an enumerative object of verbal art. Attending to the ways in which poetry

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counts may elucidate the links between form and affect, aesthetic detail and intellectual

intervention.

Such a final chapter, with its set of formal concerns and hypotheses, may accidentally

smudge the fine lines of influence drawn earlier in the project between such historical

points of interest as Newtonian calculus and Romantic aesthetics, theories of infinity and

theories of sublimity, proof and poem. But it is my hope that concluding with form will do

more. Newton’s critics called his fluxions “ghosts of departed quantities” for the ways in

which they flickered in and out of the mathematician’s field of vision. They represented

the mechanisms of a set of mathematical laws that Newton could not have known.

Although they served as a faulty foundation, they served something of value. When Cantor

devised a strong definition of infinity, what happened to Newton’s original system? Did it

cease to be meaningful? Did it cease to be beautiful?

It is one thing to examine the extent to which Romantic and post-Romantic poetry takes

up Enlightenment formulations of infinity and the extent to which articulating this context

proves a useful resource for rereading certain poetic projects. It is another thing to ask

why this metempsychosis took place, and what it can tell us about poetry broadly

conceived. Perhaps beyond the obvious cause, aesthetic theory, we find some of the most

basic mechanics of poetry and some of the simplest truths about how poetry works. Thus,

learning the poetics of infinity means not only rereading infinity in Romantic and post-

Romantic poems but also attending to the formal capacities that make such a rereading

possible.

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Conclusion

Forms of Inher i tance

I. Summation & Further I terat ions

The Crisis of Infinity: Mathematics, Philosophy, and Nineteenth-Century Poetry has sought to provide a

framework for re-reading the nineteenth-century poetic canon, a framework that can also

generate and structure critical innovations stressing the interconnections between literature

and mathematics. It is my hope that infinity will come to be understood as an aesthetic and

philosophical category, like the sublime, that can be called upon to clarify or complicate a

poem. Like the sublime, Romantic infinity is a concept neither monolithic nor stable; like

the sublime, infinity proves an historically-grounded point of reference that can facilitate

readings of poetic forms and formulations. If the work at hand has established the

application of Enlightenment and Romantic formulations of infinity to poetic texts as a

useful exegetical tool, then it has fulfilled its most tangible goal.

The list of poems read through this intellectual-historical lens has by no means been

exhaustive, and it is my hope that an understanding of Romantic infinity will facilitate further

critical investigations. In this project, I have focused on William and Dorothy Wordsworth,

but applying an understanding of Romantic reformulations of Enlightenment

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understandings of infinity would likely shed light on the works of other canonical poets as

well. In the footnotes to Chapter One, I briefly addressed the critical discussion of Blake’s

reaction to Newton, and suggested that Newton’s fluxion theory provides a productive

intellectual-historical lens through which to read Blake’s treatments of infinity. Other texts

beyond the scope of this project would likely benefit from being read in the context of the

crisis of infinity; examples include the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor

Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Understanding the links between poetry and infinity at the

turn of the nineteenth century provides a productive framework for rereading the Romantic

canon, and the readings performed here have only been the start.

Furthermore, the project’s methodology has taken as axiomatic the premise that effective

interdisciplinarity requires a willingness to cross scholarly boundaries delimiting not only

discipline but also historical period. In this way, The Crisis of Infinity shows that trans-

historical considerations of poetry can in some cases be deeply historicist insofar as they

recuperate genealogies of ideas, concepts, and debates as they resurface in verbal art. In this

vein, The Crisis of Infinity has attempted to gesture towards and contribute to a much broader

project—that of destabilizing the particularly forceful period division between the

Enlightenment and Romantic periods by showing how aspects of Romantic aesthetics, such

as the Romantic sublime, actually come out of a prior discourse. The subject experiencing

the Romantic sublime does not turn away from Enlightenment rationality in the throes of

affect and individuality; rather, this subject participates in a debate that reaches back at least

as far as Newton.

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Another ambition of the project is to assist the establishment of a critical field focused on

the intersections between mathematical and literary history. The Crisis of Infinity has sought to

illuminate an historical moment at which literary discourse participated in mathematical

history, a moment the understanding of which can situate, historicize, and to some extent

change critical investigations of the intersections among mathematical and literary projects.

To the critical field focused on literature and mathematics, the crisis of infinity represents a

moment of historical interdisciplinarity, that is, an early nineteenth-century moment at which

no external critical apparatus needs to be applied in order to bring mathematics and literature

together. Mathematical and literary history intersect at the turn of the nineteenth century,

and the existence of this sort of phenomenon—what I might call genuine or historical

interdisciplinarity—insists that critical approaches to mathematics and literature are more

than one facet of a larger critical trend towards interdisciplinarity and science studies in the

humanities, but are actually necessary if we are to understand nineteenth-century literature in

its intellectual-historical context.

Beyond the nineteenth-century poetic canon, The Crisis of Infinity has sought to rethink the

Romantic archive. Taking into account poetic treatments of enumeration and infinity can

facilitate new perspectives on nineteenth-century daily and women’s writing. In our

discussion of Dorothy Wordsworth, we saw how Wordsworth elevates the concept of the

quotidian across genres, blurring the lines between poetic and daily writing and between

literary and material forms. A future application of this project is to look at the connections

between daily and poetic writing in a range of nineteenth-century archives. In particular, it

may be possible to pick up on questions of book history and ask how the forms of

nineteenth-century daily writing are related to poetic form. What might we make, for

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example, of Charlotte Brontë’s inclusion of diary entries and poems in The Roe-Head Journal?

How might we understand Dora Wordsworth’s collection of inscriptions and doggerel in her

commonplace book? How might these projects of daily writing relate to more formal poetic

projects, both in their constructions of the book form and in their formal attention to the

passage of time?

I will close the project with a brief coda considering how the early nineteenth-century link

between poetry and infinity might facilitate alternate understandings of the nineteenth-

century inheritance in twentieth-century poetry. Critical oversimplifications of the Romantic

inheritance in later nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century poetry must be

countered, not by re-simplifications, but by complications. It is necessary to recognize that

multiple and perhaps infinite understandings of the Romantic inheritance are possible. It is

my hope that a brief exploration of the afterlives of Romantic infinity will contribute to a

critical perspective on modernism that accounts for an ever-expanding understanding of

modernism’s nineteenth-century inheritance.

II. Coda: Neo-Romantic Inf ini ty

According to linguistic anthropologists Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, when a

verbal message becomes portable text it encodes some of its history within it, incorporating

an imperfect version of its original and perhaps subsequent contexts into its form and

content. This phenomenon, which Bauman and Briggs term “entextualization,”153 may

suggest that this dissertation contains traces of having been written—or, at least, of having

been thought—backwards. My investigation of mathematics, philosophy, and nineteenth-

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century poetry is thus marked, not only by an interest in nineteenth-century literature and

intellectual history, but also by a commitment to developing a capacious understanding of

the legacy of Romanticism in later nineteenth-century, twentieth-century, and contemporary

poetry.

Romantic infinity is a neglected aspect of the Romantic inheritance in later modern poetry.

Oren Izenberg sums up the “nearly unanimous literary-historical consensus that would

divide poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and

constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde—camps that would pit form against form on

grounds at once aesthetic and ethical.”154 Albert Gelpi has summarized and defended this

dominant position on the Romantic inheritance in twentieth-century poetics, arguing that

“[j]ust as American poetry in the first half of this century turns on the dialectic, within the

period and within the poets, between Modernism and the Romanticism it masked, so the

poetry of the second half of the century can be read as the even more complicated dialectic

between Neoromanticism and Postmodernism […] the history of American poetry since the

forties can most incisively be told in terms of that dialectic.”155 Whether or not the story

promoted by Gelpi and rejected by Izenberg is true or useful, it is certainly limited in its

definition of the Romantic inheritance in twentieth-century poetry. When critics understand

the Romantic legacy as an attitude towards selfhood, the map of modernist poetics becomes

divided by lines of influence and opposition that fail to account for the many diverse

elements of nineteenth-century poetry adopted and adapted in later poetic experiments.

Nineteenth-century poetic responses to Enlightenment debates about the nature and reality

of infinity are a case in point. Looking at infinity in twentieth-century poetry can serve as a

challenge to oversimplifications of what it means to be neo-Romantic, highlighting the

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extent to which perhaps unexpected modernist and postmodern writings take up their

Romantic inheritance. Expanding our definition of what a Romantic inheritance might look

like allows us to read even the most stoic modernist and postmodern poetics within a

broader literary-critical frame. For example, George Oppen’s 1968 long poem, Of Being

Numerous, engages not only its historical moment but also the tradition of thinking through

the poetics of infinity. Charles Bernstein argues that “in Of Being Numerous, the loss of the

‘transcendent signified’ does not necessitate the abandonment, or absence, of knowledge but

its location in history, in ‘people[,]’” stating that “[t]his view entails both a rejection of the

crude materialism of things without history and the crude idealism of history without

things.”156 One might apply this perspective to critical practice and argue that even

postmodern poems require their historicist engagements.

Critics tend to focus on Oppen’s work in its immediate social, political, literary and

intellectual contexts. Referring to these points of focus, Stephen Burt has explained

Oppen’s contemporary appeal:

It’s a good time—a good decade [2000-2010]—to think about Oppen. On the one hand, we have learned—perhaps too well—to suspect any claims that the superior invention in a work of art gives a modern artist superior access to truths about social or individual life. On the other hand, we have learned—perhaps too thoroughly—to seek, in the writers we study, signs of commitment to ethical desiderata, support for programs of social justice, and an awareness, if not indeed a kind of guilt, about the conditions of privilege which helped many modernists learn to write as they did. Oppen and his poems thus seem made for us. A clear inheritor, like the other Objectivists (Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker), of goals associated with William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, but also a man of the left—and, for most of the 1930s, a committed communist—Oppen gave up writing for twenty-odd years rather than subordinate his poetic goals to Party aims. In his heyday, from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, he managed to react to public history, to meditate in verse on political responsibility, while doing justice to his own reserve. Oppen innovated while striving for

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humility, and pursued claims about ethics and obligation, without ever seeming to tell his readers (often, without even seeming to know himself) what we ought, as citizens or as human beings, to do. His poems pursued both ethics and ontology, along with American and Jewish history: what must we say, what must we never say, living and writing, for example, during the Vietnam War, and after the Holocaust?157

I tend to agree with Eliot Weinberger’s claim that “Objectivism as a topic, or as an approach

to Oppen, could be permanently retired” and that “[o]f the four poets now known as

‘Objectivists,’ [Oppen, Rekosi, Reznikoff, and Zukofsky] there is only one statement

(biographical or aesthetic) which is applicable to all: They were Jewish, and they were

obscure at the time.”158 This quibble aside, Burt’s description of Oppen’s early twenty-first-

century reception touches on an important point—that the second-generation American

modernists have been invested with a sort of ethical appeal. Indeed, when Burt asks, “what

must we say, what must we never say…after the Holocaust[,]” he invokes Adorno’s famous

claim that “[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”159 Those obscure Jews that we call

the Objectivists, then, have come to symbolize a less-barbaric modernism, though, as Burt

points out, their works are read as “inherit[ing] […] goals associated with William Carlos

Williams and Ezra Pound.”

Focusing on this idea of multiple modernisms, John Lowney sums up the dominant reading

of Of Being Numerous as follows:

As Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Nicholls, among others, have argued, Of Being Numerous enacts a critique of the ethics as well as the aesthetics of the “ego system” that structured Pound’s Cantos and subsequent long poems such as Paterson and The Maximus Poems. Oppen himself said in his interview with Dembo: “Pound’s ego system, Pound’s organization of the world around a character, a kind of masculine energy, is extremely foreign to me” […] And while Of Being Numerous posits, at times, an agonistic relation between the poet and the world, it critiques this relation through its dialogic structure, through its rhetorical strategies of self-questioning as well as

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through its extensive quotation, whether implicit or explicit, of voices and texts.160

Nicholls’ argument, we should note, engages not only modernism but also a variety of

textual and historical contexts to make this claim:

As we have seen, while Oppen was certainly drawn to various aspects of existentialism, he was not inclined to use it as a stick with which to beat the Marxist thinking that had always been so important to him. Indeed, he was fascinated by and in many ways drawn to the New Left which seemed to offer the only credible opposition to the escalating conflict in Vietnam. What would make ‘Of Being Numerous’ a complex and difficult poem was Oppen’s attempt to articulate these different tendencies together.161

Building on these contexts, Nicholls claims:

The passage beyond the self is toward something we might call ‘humanity’ or ‘numerousness’ which not only includes the self but which also offers an horizon exceeding that of the individual life.162

Speaking to the poem as representing a shift in Oppen’s career, Forrest Gander refers to

similar aspects of the poem:

[…] Of Being Numerous, with its more meditative investigation into intersubjectivity, with its query into how it might be possible to come to terms with existence among others, human and inhuman, in a place awash with preconceptions and logocentrism.163

For the philosophical, political, and formal reasons mentioned above, Oppen’s long poem

devoted to the “madness in the number/Of the living” is, in many ways, decidedly

modernist; even its closing citation from Whitman’s journals could be read as an homage to

Williams. Yet, Of Being Numerous is also a poem of preconditions and inherited modes of

being and thinking. Perhaps the poem’s attitude to its nineteenth-century inheritance is

most clearly addressed in the following lines: “I should have written, not the rain/Of a

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nineteenth century day, but the motes/In the air the dust//Here still” (sect. 37).164 While,

in true modernist fashion, Of Being Numerous avoids the nature and sentiment invoked by

“the rain/Of a nineteenth century day,” the very air the poet breathes is infused with

“dust//Here still”; this is to say that the various inheritances of literary history permeate the

poetic project. Whether Oppen applies Romantic understandings of infinity self-consciously

or whether he simply breathes them in along with so many other tropes floating in the air, it

is fascinating that Oppen figures the nineteenth-century influence as dust motes, intrinsically

numerous and uncountable, ephemeral objects that inflect the boundless and expansive air.

In a similar construction, Oppen writes:

There can be a brick In a brick wall The eye picks So quiet of a Sunday Here is the brick, it was waiting Here when you were born Mary-Anne. (sect. 21)

Oppen thus emphasizes the preconditions of being and of writing; his long poetic treatment

of “inevitable” “infiniteness” and the tension between multiplicity and singularity activates

Romantic formulations of infinity.28

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!28 Writing on Of Being Numerous, Mary Esteve argues that “Oppen plants himself squarely in the aesthetic and philosophical tradition of the sublime[,]” stating that “Oppen brings his dual senses of sublime shipwreck and autonomous poet-spectatorship to bear not only on the world of the sixties but on the longer span of American generational history.” [Mary Esteve, “Shipwreck and Autonomy: Rawls, Riesman, and Oppen in the 1960s,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 18, no 2, Fall 2005: 343-4.] I agree that Oppen uses Romantic aesthetics, and focus here on the extent to which Of Being Numerous relies on Romantic formulations of infinity.

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Of Being Numerous is a straightforward poem to read—spare, direct: “Speak//If you

can//Speak” (sect. 11). Yet it is a poem that resists intervention, and thus resists critique:

“the rain falls/that had not been falling/and it is the same world” (sect. 12). It is a poem

that questions itself, that makes the critic question herself:

How forget that? How talk Distantly of ‘The People’ Who are that force Within the walls Of cities Wherein their cars Echo like history Down walled avenues In which one cannot speak. (sect. 14)

The form and focus of Of Being Numerous is enumerative. Staged in 40 sections and obsessed

with the interplay between singularity and plurality, the poem meditates on the claim that

“Surely infiniteness is the most evident thing in the world” (sect. 34), and examines a world

in which “We want to defend/Limitation/And do not know how” (sect. 26). The poem

activates a sprawling calculus of modern life, a calculus in which “The shuffling of a crowd is

nothing—/well, nothing but the many that we are, but nothing” (sect. 10), and in which “we

know that lives/Are single” (sect. 26). Paired, these two quotes from the poem evoke a

variety of Enlightenment and Romantic understandings of infinity. That the crowd is

“nothing but the many that we are” evokes not only Newton’s interrelated treatments of

zero and infinity but also Burke’s artificial infinite, the idea that infinity is sometimes no

more than a feeling that arises from the perception of finite forms. The idea that “we know

that lives/Are single” simultaneously evokes, both Locke’s and the Wordsworths’ insistence

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on the infinity of singular identities, and Hume’s rejection of the idea that infinity has or

should have anything to do with human life.

Two of the poem’s most famous passages take the shipwrecked man as an emblem of the

heroic, fantastic, terrifying singularity against which society strives:

[…]Crusoe We say was ‘Rescued’. So we have chosen. 7 Obsessed, bewildered By the shipwreck Of the singular We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous. (sect. 6-7)

And:

The absolute singular The unearthly bonds Of the singular Which is the bright light of shipwreck (sect. 9)

In the former excerpt, the numeral separating the sections provides a sort of linguistic

recursion if read out loud: “chosen/‘seven’/obsessed.” Indeed, the word “chosen” picks up

the phonemes of “Crusoe,” so that Crusoe is not only “Rescued” but also linguistically

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reintegrated into multiplicity. On the level of letter and sound, Crusoe becomes the

“chosen” state of being numerous, which becomes the multiple and symbolically lucky

number “seven,” a process that both creates and counters the human obsession with the

“shipwreck,” the disaster, “of the singular.” The latter excerpt picks up on this obsession,

describing singularity as icon and other—“absolute,” “unearthly,” a “bright light.” In an

inverse of Lockean and other formulations of infinity, here it is not infinity, but rather its

opposite, singularity, that is the transcendent, divine, and perhaps impossible concept

towards and for which one counts.

In Of Being Numerous, the Lockean/Kantian formulation by which one counts towards

infinity or sublimity is refigured as the practice by which one creates art:

One must not come to feel that he has a thousand threads in his hands, He must somehow see the one thing; This is the level of art There are other levels But there is no other level of art. (sect. 27)

For Oppen, the “level of art” is the level of perception at which one can perceive how the

many become one. In addition to invoking Whitman, a poet addressed and quoted by

Oppen elsewhere in the poem, this passage seems to echo a Spinozist spirituality, as well as

Coleridge’s response to Spinoza in his journals:

Poem on Spirit – or on Spinoza – I would make a pilgrimage to the Deserts of Arabia to find the man who could make [me] understand how the one can be many! Eternal universal mystery! It seems as if it were impossible; yet it is--& it is every where! – It is indeed a contradiction in Terms: and only in Terms! – It is the copresence of Feeling & Life, limitless by their very essence, with Form, by its very essence limited – determinate – definite. –165

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Taken part by part, however, Oppen’s definition of the “level of art” mirrors Locke’s

formulation by which one progresses from enumerative, sensory experience to a belief in

infinity—one “must not come to feel” a thousand things, but must somehow “see the one

thing.” Here, “feeling” gives way to “seeing”—perhaps, thinking of Blake, we could argue

that the doors of perception are cleansed and infinity is revealed, or that “The Eye sees more

than the Heart knows.”166 In Of Being Numerous, it is not infinity as such, but a

comprehension that all multiple things are part of a greater whole, that constitutes the “level

of art.” In this way, both the singular and the multiple are infinite. Oppen’s rejection of the

singular self, society’s rejection of the single self, is not a rejection of Romanticism.

Perhaps this artistic apposition between singularity and multiplicity is most clearly expressed

by a more distinctly neo-Romantic poet, Wallace Stevens, in Metaphors of a Magnifico. I quote

that poem here in its entirety:

Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village. This is an old song That will not declare itself . . . Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are Twenty men crossing a bridge Into a village. That will not declare itself Yet is certain as meaning . . . The boots of the men clump

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On the boards of the bridge. The first white wall of the village Rises through fruit-trees. Of what was it I was thinking? So the meaning escapes. The first white wall of the village . . . The fruit-trees . . .167

Like Oppen, Stevens alludes to Whitman (in this case, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry). However, like

Oppen, and unlike Whitman, Stevens examines the intrinsic connection of the individual and

collective, not only as something to be celebrated, but also as something to be questioned

and challenged—“Of what was it I was thinking?/So the meaning escapes” emphasizes the

distinctly anti-Whitmanic sentiment that the interconnectivity of numerous people is not

inherently meaningful. Stevens and Oppen theorize the leap from single to collective

identity—which is, for them, a false leap—the shift of vision from the one to the

incomprehensible many, or from the many to the artistic and elevated one. In so doing,

their modernist experiments invoke and respond to a diverse Romantic poetics of infinity.

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Notes

!"!Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). !#!Niel Hertz, “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime,” in The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). !$!Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). !%!Ferguson, Frances. Solitude and the Sublime (New York: Routledge, 1992). 5 See Andrea Henderson, “Math for Math’s Sake: Non-Euclidean Geometry, Aestheticism, and Flatland,” PMLA 124, no. 2, March 2009: 455-471. 6 William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979), 460. 7 William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), 39. 8 Byron, George Gordon, Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 131. 9 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002), 98-101. 10 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Roger Woolhouse (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 198. 11 Ibid., 299. 12 Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems, ed. Janet Gezari (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 62. 13 Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (New York: Knopf, 2003), 201. 14 Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë, ed. Clement Shorter (New York; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1910), 306. 15 Miller, Myth, 28. 16 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. W. J. B. Owen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 76-80. 17 Alice Jenkins, “George Eliot, Geometry and Gender,” in Literature and Science, ed. Sharon Ruston and the English Association (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 72. 18 G. Donald Allen, “The History of Infinity,” in Lectures on the History of Mathematics by G. Donald Allen, Texas A & M University. !

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!19 Hans Niels Jahnke, “Cantor’s Cardinal and Ordinal Infinities: An Epistemological and Didactic View,” Educational Studies in Mathematics 48, no. 2/3, Infinity: The Never-Ending Struggle (2001): 178. 20 Joseph W. Dauben, “Georg Cantor: The Personal Matrix of His Mathematics,” Isis 69, no. 4 (Dec., 1978): 547-8. 21 Ignacio Jané, “The Role of the Absolute Infinite in Cantor’s Conception of Set,” Erkenntnis (1975-) 42, no. 3 (May, 1995): 379.! 22 Niccolò Guicciardini, Isaac Newton on Mathematical Certainty and Method (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 380-1. 23 Carl B. Boyer, The History of the Calculus and its Conceptual Development (New York: Dover, 1959), 195.

24 Robert Kaplan, The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 168-9.

25 Boyer, History of the Calculus, 200-1. !26 Scott Mandelbrote, “‘A Duty of the Greatest Moment’: Isaac Newton and the Writing of Biblical Criticism,” The British Journal for the History of Science 26, no. 3 (Sep., 1993): 299. !27 Ayval Ramati, “The Hidden Truth of Creation: Newton's Method of Fluxions,” The British Journal for the History of Science 34, no. 4 (Dec., 2001): 433. !28 Ayval Leshem, Newton on Mathematics and Spiritual Purity (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 141. 29 Ibid., 49.! 30 M. Hughes, "Newton, Hermes and Berkeley," The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43, no. 1 (Mar., 1992): 18. 31 Guicciardini, Mathematical Certainty, 10. (Quoting Newton in a draft of a letter intended for Pierre Des Maizeaux, August 1718.) 32 George Berkeley, The Analyst; Or, a Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician. Wherein it is Examined Whether the Object, Principles, and Inferences of the Modern Analysis are More Distinctly Conceived, Or More Evidently Deduced, than Religious Mysteries and Points of Faith (London: Printed for J. Tonson, 1734), 12. 33 George Berkeley, A Defence of Free-Thinking in Mathematics in Answer to a Pamphlet of Philalethes Cantabrigiensis, Intituled, Geometry no Friend to Infidelity, Or a Defence of Sir Isaac Newton, and the British Mathematicians. also an Appendix Concerning Mr. Walton's Vindication of the Principles of Fluxions ... by the Author of the Minute Philosopher (London: printed for J. Tonson, 1735), 8. 34 Berkeley, Analyst, 13-4. 35 Allen, “The History of Infinity,” 5. 36Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. David Womersley (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 115. 37 Shelley, Poetry and Prose, 97-101, ll. 131-2. !

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! 139!

!38 Burke, Enquiry, 116. 39 Locke, Essay, 198. 40 Burke, Enquiry, 86. 41 Ibid., 119. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 125. 44 Ibid., 106. 45 Ibid., 118. 46 Ibid., 101. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 198. 50 Berkeley, Analyst, 34. 51 Ibid., 8. 52 Locke, Essay, 198. 53 Ibid., 299. 54 Ibid., 302. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 307. 57 Ibid., 308. 58 Ibid., 195. 59 Ibid., 201. 60 Ibid., 202. 61 Ibid., 205. 62 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 262. 63 Locke, Essay, 313. 64 Ibid., 309. 65 Shelley, Poetry and Prose, 510-11. !

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! 66 Ibid., 516. 67 Burke, Enquiry, 65. 68 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith, ed. Nicholas Walker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 85. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 86. !71 C. Fred Alford, The Self in Social Theory: A Psychoanalytic Account of its Construction in Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rawls, and Rousseau (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 138. !72 Ibid., 138. !73 W. Uzgalis, Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding: A Reader's Guide (London; New York: Continuum, 2007), 132. !74 Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 2. !75 Ibid., 4. !76 William Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xv. !77 Ibid., 193. !78 Ibid., 189. !79 Caruth, Truths, 43. 80 A. C. Baier, Untitled Review, The Philosophical Review 70, no. 4 (Oct., 1961): 563. 81 M. H. Abrams, Untitled Review, Modern Language Notes 76, no. 8 (Dec., 1961): 882. 82 William Wordsworth, “Essay Upon Epitaphs, I,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, Ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 51. This passage remains the same throughout subsequent printings of the essay. Owen and Smyser’s edition takes the text of the essay from Poetical Works (1849-50). !83 Locke, Essay, 302. !84 Ibid., 199. 85 Robert Browning, Robert Browning’s Poetry, ed. James F. Loucks and Andrew M. Stauffer (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 264-6. 86 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 104-105. !

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! 141!

!87 Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Wordsworth, The Borderers, and ‘Intellectual Murder,’” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 62, no. 4 (Oct., 1963): 761. 88 Hume, Treatise, 28. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., 26-7. 92 Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, 490. 93 Hume, Treatise, 27. 94 Dale Jacquette, David Hume's Critique of Infinity (Boston: Brill, 2001), 21. 95 Ibid., 310. 96 Ibid., 314. 97 Ibid., 333. 98 Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 103-4. 99 Ibid., 104-5. 100 Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 36. 101 Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 41. !102 Ibid., 44. 103 Ibid., 48. 104 Ibid., 52. 105 Ibid., 42. 106 Ibid., 57. 107 Ibid., 1. 108 All manuscript transcriptions and images reproduced herein are used with the kind permission of The Wordsworth Trust. DCMS 120.26. 109 Kenneth R. Cervelli, Dorothy Wordsworth's Ecology (New York: Routledge, 2007), 66-7. 110 DCMS 120.26. !"""!William Wordsworth, Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years: Including the Borderers, a Tragedy (London: Edward Moxon, 1842), 230.! !

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! 142!

!112 Commonplace book copy of Lines Intended for Edith Southey’s Album: DCMS 120.25; commonplace book copy of Floating Island at Hawkshead: DCMS 120.26. 113 DCMS 120.27. 114 DCMS 151.3.30. 115 Burke, Enquiry, 101. 116 Levin includes an image of this poem-in-palimpsest with the Introduction to the Revised Edition of Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism. Susan M. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism: Revised Edition (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2009), 0. 117 DCMS 118.3. 118 DCMS 118.1. !119 It may be worth noting that the title Journal of a Tour on the Continent may have been applied retroactively, and may not be Wordsworth’s title for the piece. As opposed to Recollections of a Tour in Scotland, both volumes of Wordsworth’s fair copy lack a title page, and the binding is labeled only “Journal of a Tour.” (Both volumes of the fair copy of Recollections of a Tour in Scotland have an intricate title page, reading “Recollections of a Tour in Scotland by D. Wordsworth Addressed to her Friends.” This fair copy is written in the hand of Catherine Clarkson; towards the end of the second volume, at the end of a paragraph discussing the task of copying over the journal, Clarkson thanks her husband for making the title page: “[…] and the title, on the first page of the work, which my Husband had the kindness to interrupt himself, when he was exceeding busy in his own work, to write for me” (DCMS 50).!!120 Dorothy Wordsworth, The Continental Journals 1798-1820, ed. Helen Boden (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), 88-9. 121 Wordsworth, Longman, 167. 122 Wordsworth, Longman, 145. 123 DCMS 90.33 and 90.34, respectively. 124 The first volume concludes with “End of First Part.” followed by the footnote, “See extracts from Brockeden’s Passes of the Alps at the end of 2nd Volume. DW.” This is, in turn, followed by a table of contents and by the travelers’ route. DCMS 90. 125 DCMS 90.35. 126 Dorothy Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth: The Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993), 176. 127 Lucy Newlyn, “Dorothy Wordsworth's Experimental Style,” Essays in Criticism 57, no. 4 (2007): 332. 128 Ibid., 333. 129 Hyman Eigerman, The Poetry of Dorothy Wordsworth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), i. 130 Ibid., 15. 131 Wordsworth, Grasmere Journals, 2-3. !

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! 143!

! 132 Byron, The Major Works, 19-206. 133 Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 111-7. 134 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, the 1892 Edition (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), 22-73. !135 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Break, Break, Break, The Poetry Foundation. 136 William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1970), 89. 137 Ibid., 112-3. 138 Ibid., 89. 139 Ibid., 106. 140 Ibid., 108-9. !141 See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). !142 See Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). 143 Jack Spicer, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, ed. Robert Duncan (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1999), 152. 144 Ibid., 174. 145 Ross Feld, "The Apostle's Grudge at the Persistence of Poetry," Ironwood 28 (1986): 191. 146 Spicer, Collected, 144. 147 Ibid., 132. 148 Ibid., 153. 149 Ibid., 153. 150 Ibid., 172. 151 Ibid., 177. 152 Ibid., 182. 153 Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, “Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life,” Annual review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 73. !154 Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 1. !155 Albert Gelpi, “The Genealogy of Postmodernism: Contemporary American Poetry,” The Southern Review, Summer 1990: 541. !

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!!156 Charles Bernstein, “Hinge Picture (on George Oppen),” in Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen, ed. Steve Shoemaker (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2009), 198. 157 Stephen Burt, “George Oppen and the Limits of Words,” Modernism/modernity 15, no. 3, September 2008: 457. 158 Eliot Weinberger, Works on Paper (New York: New Directions, 1986), 90. !159 Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” In Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 34. 160 John Lowney, History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935-1968 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 200. 161 Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and The Fate of Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 85. 162 Ibid., 93. 163 Forrest Gander, “Finding the Phenomenal Oppen,” in Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen, ed. Steve Shoemaker (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2009), 121. 164 George Oppen, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New Directions Books, 2002), 163-188. 165 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection, ed. Seamus Perry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 37. 166 Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose (Visions of the Daughters of Albion), 5. 167 Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 19.

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